Sisters / Norris, Kathleen Thompson, 1880-1966

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Title: Sisters

Author: Kathleen Norris

Release Date: January, 2004 [EBook #4947]
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[This file was first posted on April 3, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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THE WORKS OF KATHLEEN NORRIS

SISTERS

VOLUME X




TO

FRANCES ROSE BENET

  Dear mother of my mother's child, to you
    The tribute brings not praise from me alone,
    Still clings some grace of hers to what I do,
    And the gift comes in her name, as my own.




CHAPTER I


Cherry Strickland came in the door of the Strickland house, and
shut it behind her, and stood so, with her hands behind her on the
knob, and her slender body leaning forward, and her breath rising
and falling on deep, ecstatic breaths. It was May in California,
she was just eighteen, and for twenty-one minutes she had been
engaged to be married.

She hardly knew why, after that last farewell to Martin, she had
run so swiftly up the path, and why she had flashed into the
house, and closed the door with such noiseless haste. There was
nothing to run for! But it was as if she feared that the joy
within her might escape into the moonlight night that was so
perfumed with lilacs and the scent of wet woods. In this new
happiness of hers a fear was already mingled, a sweet fear, truly,
and a delicious fear, but she had never feared anything before in
her life. She was afraid now that it was all too wonderful to be
true, that she would awaken in the morning to find it only a
dream, that she would somehow fall short of Martin's ideal--
somehow fail him--somehow turn all this magic of moonshine and
kisses into ashes and heartbreak.

She was a miser with her treasure, already; she wanted to fly with
it, and to hide it away, and to test its reality in secret, alone.
She had come running in from the wonderland down by the gate, just
for this, just to prove to herself that it would not vanish in the
commonplaceness of the shabby hall, would not disappear before the
everyday contact of everyday things.

There was moonlight here, too, falling in clear squares on the
stairway landing, white and mysterious and bewitching, but on the
other side of the hall was wholesome, cheerful lamplight creeping
in a warm streak under the sitting-room door.

Dad was in the sitting room, with the girls. The doctor's house
was full of girls. Anne, his niece, was twenty-four; Alix,
Cherry's sister, three years younger--how staid and unmarried and
undesired they seemed to-night to panting and glowing and
glorified eighteen! Anne, with Alix's erratic help, kept house for
her uncle, and was supposed to keep a sharp eye on Cherry, too.
But she hadn't been sharp enough to keep Martin Lloyd from asking
her to marry him, exulted Cherry, as she stood breathless and
laughing in the dark hallway.

Cherry had never had any other home than this shabby brown
bungalow, and she knew every inch of the hall, even without light
to see it. She knew the faded rugs, and the study door that
swallowed up her father every day, and the table where Alix had
put a great bowl of buttercups, and the glass-paned door at the
back through which the doctor's girls had looked out at many a
frosty morning, and red sunset, and sun-steeped summer afternoon.
But even the old hall had seemed transformed to-night, lighted
with a beauty quite new, scented with an immortal sweetness.

Hong came out of the dining room; the varnished buttercups
twinkled in a sudden flood of light. He had come to put a folded
tablecloth into the old wardrobe that did for a sideboard, under
the stairs. Cherry, descending to earth, smiled at him, and
crossed the hall to the sitting-room door.

An older woman might have gone upstairs, to dream alone of her new
joy, but Cherry thought that it would be "fun" to join the family,
and "act as if nothing had happened!" She was only a child, after
all.

Consciously or unconsciously, they had all tried to keep her a
child, these three who looked up to smile at her as she came in.
One of them, rosy, gray-headed, magnificent at sixty, was her
father, whose favourite she knew she was. He held out his hand to
her without closing the book that was in the other hand, and drew
her to the wide arm of his chair, where she settled herself with
her soft young body resting against him, her slim ankles crossed,
and her cheek dropped against his thick silver hair.

Alix was reading, and dreamily scratching her ankle as she read;
she was a tall, awkward girl, younger far at twenty-one than
Cherry was at eighteen, pretty in a gipsyish way, untidy as to
hair, with round black eyes, high, thin cheek-bones marked with
scarlet, and a wide, humorous mouth that was somehow droll in its
expression even when she was angry or serious. She was rarely
angry; she was unexacting, good-humoured, preferring animals to
people, and unconventional in speech and manner. Her father and
Anne sometimes discussed her anxiously; they confessed that they
were rather fearful for Alix. For Cherry, neither one had ever had
a disquieting thought.

Anne, smiling demurely over her white sewing, was a small,
prettily-made little woman, with silky hair trimly braided, and a
rather pale, small face with charming and regular features. She
was not considered exactly pretty; perhaps the contrast with
Cherry's unusual beauty was rather hard on both the older girls;
but she was so perfectly capable in her little groove, so busy,
contented, and necessary in the doctor's household, that it was
rather a habit with all their friends to praise Anne. Anne had
"admirers," too, Cherry reflected, looking at her to-night, but
neither she nor Alix had ever been engaged--engaged--engaged!

"Aren't you home early?" said Doctor Strickland, rubbing his cheek
against his youngest daughter's cheek in sleepy content. He was
never quite happy unless all three girls were in his sight, but
for this girl he had always felt an especial protecting fondness.
It seemed only yesterday that Cherry, a rosy-cheeked sturdy little
girl in a checked gingham apron, had been trotting off to school;
to him it was yesterday that she had been a squarely-built baby,
digging in the garden paths, and sniffing at the border pinks. He
had followed her exquisite childhood with more than a father's
usual devotion, perhaps because she really had been an
exceptionally endearing child, perhaps because she had been given
him, a tiny crying thing in a blanket, to fill the great gap her
mother's going had left in his heart. He had sympathized with her
microscopic cut fingers, he had smiled into her glowing, damp
little face when she stuttered to him long tales of bad doggies
and big 'ticks; he had brought her "jacks" and paper-dolls and
hair ribbons; he loved the diminutive femininity of the creature;
she was all a woman, even at three. Alix he proudly called his
"boy"; Alix used hair ribbons to tie up her dogs, and demanded hip
boots and an air rifle and got them, too, and used them, but when
he took Alix in his arms she was apt to bump his nose violently
with her hard young head, to break his glasses, or at best to
wriggle herself free. Little Cherry, however, was 'fraid of dogs,
she told her father, and of guns, and she would curl up in his
arms for happy half-hours, with her gold curls sprayed against his
shoulder, and her soft little hand tucked into his own.

"Mr. Lloyd had to take the nine o'clock train," Cherry answered
her father dreamily, "and he and Peter walked home with me!" She
did not add that Peter had left them at his own turning, a quarter
of a mile away.

"I thought he wasn't going to be at Mrs. North's for dinner," Anne
observed quietly, in the silence. She had been informally asked to
the Norths' for dinner that evening herself, and had declined for
no other reason than that attractive Martin Lloyd was presumably
not to be there.

"He wasn't," Cherry said. "He thought he had to go to town at six.
I just stopped in to give them Dad's message, and they teased me
to stay. You knew where I was, didn't you--Dad?" she murmured.

"Mrs. North telephoned about six, and said you were there, but she
didn't say that Mr. Lloyd was," Anne said, with a faint hint of
discontent in her tone.

Alix fixed her bright, mischievous eyes upon the two, and
suspended her reading for a moment. Alix's attitude toward the
opposite sex was one of calm contempt, outwardly. But she had made
rather an exception of Martin Lloyd, and had recently had a
conversation with him on the subject of sensible, platonic
friendships between men and women. At the mention of his name she
looked up, remembering this talk with a little thrill.

His name had thrilled Anne, too, although she betrayed no sign of
it as she sat quietly matching silks. In fact, all three of the
girls were quite ready to fall in love with young Lloyd, if two of
them had not actually done so.

He was a newcomer in the little town, a tall, presentable fellow,
ready with laughter, ready with words, and always more than ready
for flirtation. He admitted that he liked to flirt; his gay daring
had quite carried Anne's citadel, and had even gained Alix's
grudging response. Cherry had not been at home when Martin first
appeared in Mill Valley, and the older girls had written her,
visiting friends in Napa, that she must come and meet the new man.

Martin was a mining engineer: he had been employed in a Nevada
mine, but was visiting his cousin in the valley now before going
to a new position in June. In its informal fashion, Mill Valley
had entertained him; he had tramped to the big forest five miles
away with the Stricklands, and there had been a picnic to the
mountain-top, everybody making the hard climb except Peter Joyce,
who was a trifle lame, and perhaps a little lazy as well, and who
usually rode an old horse, with the lunch in saddle-bags at each
side. Alix formulated her theories of platonic friendships on
these walks; Anne dreamed a foolish, happy dream. Girls did marry,
men did take wives to themselves, dreamed Anne; it would be
unspeakably sweet, but it would be no miracle!

And Anne, always busy and happy and helpful, was more so than
ever, unpacking the delicious lunch, capably arranging for
everybody's comfort and pleasure, looking up with innocent
surprise when Martin bent over her as she fussed and rearranged
baskets.

"I thought YOU were gathering wood!"

"Did you, indeed? Let the other fellows do that. I shan't be here
forever, and I'm privileged."

"Would you like me to give you something else to do?"

"No, ma'am, I'm quite happy, thank you!"

Not much in the words to remember, truly, but the tone and the
look went straight to Anne's close-guarded heart. Every time she
looked up at the mountain, rearing its dark crest above the little
valley, they had come back to her.

That was all several weeks ago, now. It was just after that
mountain picnic that Cherry had come home; on a Sunday, as it
chanced, that was her eighteenth birthday, and on which Martin and
his aunt were coming to dinner. Alix had marked the occasion by
wearing a loose velvet gown in which she fancied herself; Anne had
conscientiously decorated the table, had seen to it that there was
ice-cream, and chicken, and all the accessories that make a Sunday
dinner in the country a national institution. Cherry had done
nothing helpful.

On the contrary, she had disgraced herself and infuriated Hong by
deciding to make fudge the last minute. Hong had finally relegated
her to the laundry, and it was from this limbo that Martin,
laughing joyously, extricated her, when, sticky and repentant, she
had called for help. It was Martin who untied the checked brown
apron, disentangling from the strings the silky gold tendrils that
were blowing over Cherry's white neck, and Martin who opened the
door for her sugary fingers, and Martin who watched the flying
little figure out of sight with a prolonged "Whew-w-w!" of utter
astonishment. The child was a beauty.

But if she was beautiful when flushed and cross and sticky, there
was no word for her when she presently came demurely downstairs,
her exquisite little red mouth still pouting, her bright head
still drooping sulkily, but her wonderful eyes glinting mischief,
and the dark, tumbled apron replaced by thin white ruffles that
began at Cherry's shoulders and ended above her ankles. Soft, firm
round chin, straight little nose, blue eyes ringed with babyish
shadows; Martin found them all adorable, as was every inch of the
slender, beautifully made little body, the brown warm hand, the
clear, childish forehead, the square little foot in a shining
slipper.

Her eighteenth birthday! He learned that she had just put up her
hair, indeed, after dinner, her father made her tumble it down in
a golden mop again. "Can't lose my last girl, you know," he said
to Mrs. North, Martin's aunt, seriously. Martin had been shown her
birthday gifts: books and a silver belt buckle and a gold pen and
stationery and handkerchiefs. A day or two later she had had
another gift; had opened the tiny Shreve box with a sudden
hammering at her heart, with a presage of delight. She had found a
silver-topped candy jar, and the card of Mr. John Martin Lloyd,
and under the name, in tiny letters, the words "O fudge!" The
girls laughed over this nonsense appreciatively, but there was
more than laughter in Cherry's heart.

From that moment the world was changed. Her father, her sister,
her cousin had second place, now. Cherry had put out her innocent
little hand, and had opened the gate, and had passed through it
into the world. That hour was the beginning, and it had led her
surely, steadily, to the other hour to-night when she had been
kissed, and had kissed in return.

Nobody dreamed it, she told herself with innocent exultation,
looking at Alix, sunk into her chair ungracefully, and at Anne,
peacefully sewing. They thought of her as a child--she, who was
engaged to be married!

"So--we walk home with young men?" mused the doctor, smiling.
"Look here, girls, this little Miss Muffet will be cutting you
both out with that young man, if you're not careful!"

Alix, deep in her story, did not hear him, but Anne smiled
faintly, and faintly frowned as she shook her head. She considered
Cherry sufficiently precocious without Uncle Lee's ill-considered
tolerance. Anne had often told him that Cherry was the "pink-and-
white type" that would attract "boys" soon enough without any
encouragement from him. But he persisted in regarding her as
nothing more than a captivating baby!

He would have had them always children, this tender, simple,
innocent Doctor Strickland. He was in many ways a child himself.
He had never made money in his profession; he and his wife and the
two tiny girls had had a hard enough struggle sometimes. Anne and
her own father had joined the family eight years ago, in the same
year that the Strickland Patent Fire Extinguisher, over which the
doctor had been puttering for years, had been sold. It did not
sell, as his neighbours believed, for a million dollars, but for
perhaps one tenth of that sum. It was enough, and more than
enough, whatever it was. After Anne's father died it meant that
the doctor could live on in the brown house under the redwoods,
with his girls, reading, fussing with a new invention, walking,
consulting with Anne, laughing at Alix, and spoiling his youngest-
born.

The house was shingled, low, framed in wide porches, smelling
within and without of the sweet woods about it. Here the
Stricklands weathered the cold, damp winters, when the trees
dripped and the creeks swelled, and here they watched the first
emerald of spring breaking through the loam of a thousand autumns;
here they hunted for iris and wild lilac in April, and hung
Japanese lanterns through the long, warm summers. It was a perfect
life for the old man; it was only lately that he begun uneasily to
suspect that they would some day want something more, that they
would some day tire of empty forest and blowing mountain ridge,
and go away from the shadow of Mt. Tamalpais, and into the world.

Anne, now--was she beginning to fancy this young Lloyd? Doctor
Strickland was surprised with the fervour with which he repudiated
the thought. Anne had been admired, she must go to her own home
some day. But her uncle hoped that it would be a neighbouring
home; this young engineer, who had drifted already into a dozen
different and distant places, was not the man for staid little
Anne. He was twenty-eight years old, but it was not the
discrepancy in years that mattered. The doctor had himself been
twelve years older than his wife. No, it was something less
tangible--

"What did you want to see Mr. Lloyd about to-morrow, Dad?" Cherry
interrupted his thoughts to ask.

"The rose vine!" her father reminded her.

"You'll never get that back on the roof!" Alix looked up to assure
him discouragingly. "I told you, when you were pruning it," she
added vivaciously, "that you were cutting too deep. No--you knew
it all! Now the first wind brings it down all over the place, and
you get exactly what you deserve!"

Her tone was less harsh than her words; indeed, it was the tone he
loved from her, that of a devoted but long-suffering mother. She
came to Cherry's hassock, and dropped on it, and rested her untidy
head against his knee.

"Anne aided and abetted me!" said the doctor meekly.

"To the extent of handing you your shears!" Anne said promptly.

"No, but really you know, Dad, you were a pig-headed little
creature to do that!" Alix said musically. "You might just as well
cut it down at the roots and plant another double banksia."

"I rather thought that Lloyd might have some idea of a tackle--or
a derrick or something--" submitted her father vaguely.

"Well, if anybody can--" Anne conceded, laughing. "What did he say
about coming over, Cherry?"

But Cherry had not been listening, and the conversation was
reviewed for her benefit. She remarked, between two rending yawns,
that Mr. Lloyd was coming over to-morrow at ten o'clock, and
Peter, too--

"Peter won't be much good!" Alix commented. Cherry looked at her
reproachfully.

"You're awfully mean to Peter, lately!" she protested. Her father
gave her a shrewd look, with his good-night kiss, and immediately
afterward both the younger girls dragged their way up to bed.

Alix and Cherry shared a bare, woody-smelling room tucked away
under brown eaves. The walls were of raw pine, the latticed
windows, in bungalow fashion, opened into the fragrant darkness of
the night. The beds were really bunks, and above her bunk each
girl had an extra berth, for occasional guests. There was scant
prettiness in the room, and yet it was full of purity and charm.
The girls sat upon their beds while they were undressing, and
plunged upon their knees on the bare pine floor and rested their
elbows upon the faded patchwork quilts while they said their
prayers. Mill Valley was so healthful a little mountain village
that among her two thousand residents there was only one doctor,
the old man who sat by the fire downstairs, and he had formally
retired from general practice. The girls, like all their
neighbours, were hardy, bred to cold baths, long walks, simple
hours, and simple food. In the soft Western climate they left
their bedroom windows open the year round; they liked to wake to
winter damp and fog, and go downstairs with blue finger-tips and
chattering teeth, to warm themselves with breakfast and the fire.

So Alix said nothing when Cherry went to the window to-night, and
knelt at it, looking out into the redwoods, and breathing the
piney air. In the silence of the little room the girls could hear
a swollen creek rushing; rich, loamy odours drifted in from the
forest that had been soaked with long April rains. Cherry saw a
streak of light under the door of Hong's cabin, a hundred yards
away; there was no moon, it was blackness unbroken under the
trees. The season was late, but the girls felt with a rush of
delight that summer was with them at last; the air was soft and
warm, and there was a general sense of being freed from the
winter's wetness and heaviness.

Alix rolled herself in a gray army blanket, and was asleep in some
sixty seconds. But Cherry felt that she was floating in seas of
new joy and utter delight, and that she would never be sleepy
again.

Downstairs Anne and the doctor sat staidly on, the man dreaming
with a knotted forehead, the girl sewing. Presently she ran a
needle through her fine white work with seven tiny stitches,
folded it, and put her thimble into a case that hung from her
orderly workbag with a long ribbon.

"Wait a minute, Anne," said the doctor, as she straightened
herself to rise. "This young Lloyd, now--what do YOU think of
him?"

She widened demure blue eyes.

"Should you be sorry if I--liked him, Uncle Lee?" she smiled.

The old man rumpled his silver hair restlessly.

"No-o," he said, a little ruefully. "I suppose it'll be some man
some day, my dear. I've been thinking--even little Cherry seems to
be growing up!"

Anne, who modelled her deportment somewhat upon the conduct of
Esther in "Bleak House," came to the hassock at his knee, and sat
there, looking up at him with bright affection and respect.

"Cherry's only a child," she assured him, "and Alix will not be
ready to give her heart to any man for years to come! But I'm
twenty-four, Uncle. And sometimes I feel ready to--to try my own
wings!"

He smiled at her absently; he was thinking of her mother, an
articulate, academic, resolute woman, of whom he had never been
fond.

"That's the way the wind blows, eh?" he asked kindly.

Anne widened her pretty eyes.

"Well--you see how much he's here! You see the flowers and books
and notes. I'm not the sort of girl to wear my heart on my
sleeve," Anne, who was fond of small conservational tags, assured
him merrily. "But there must be some fire where there's so much
smoke!" she ended.

"You're not sure, my dear?" he asked, after some thought.

"Oh, no!" she answered. "It's just a fancy that persists in coming
and going. You know, Uncle Lee," Anne pursued, confidentially,
"I've always had rather a high ideal of marriage. I've always said
that the man I would marry must be a big man--oh, I don't mean
only physically! I mean morally, mentally--a man among men!"

"And you think young Lloyd--answers that description, eh?"

"I think he does, Uncle Lee," she answered seriously. And
immediately afterward she got to her feet, saying brightly, "Well!
we mustn't take this too gravely--yet. It was only that I wanted
to be open and above-board with you, Uncle, from the beginning.
That's the only honest way."

"That's wise and right!" her uncle answered, in the kindly, absent
tone he had used to them as children, a tone he was apt to use to
Anne when she was in her highest mood, and one she rather
resented.

"Cherry, now--" he asked, detaining her for a moment. "She--you
don't think that perhaps Peter admires her?"

"PETER!" Anne echoed amazedly, and stood thinking.

Peter was more than thirty years old, thin, scholarly, something
of a solitary, the sweet, dreamy, affectionate neighbour who had
shared the girls' lives for the past ten years. Cherry had bullied
Peter since her babyhood, ruined his piano with sticky fingers,
trampled his rose-beds, coaxed him into asking her father to let
her sit up for dinner. For some reason she could not, or would
not, define, Anne liked the idea of Cherry and Peter falling in
love--

"Somehow one doesn't think of Peter as marrying any one--" she
said slowly, still trying to grasp the thought. "He's so--self-
sufficient," she added, shaking her head. "You--you WOULDN'T like
that, Uncle?"

"Peter is a dear fellow," the doctor mused. "But Cherry--why,
she's barely eighteen! He--" The old man hesitated, began again:
"I suppose there's no reason why Peter shouldn't kiss her, in a--
brotherly sort of way?" he submitted doubtfully.

"Did he kiss her?" Anne exclaimed.

"I don't know that he did," Cherry's father said hastily.

"But what made you think he did?" the girl persisted.

"Just a fancy," he assured her. "Just an old father's fear that
she is growing up too fast!"

"Because we all, and you especially, spoil her," Anne reminded
him, smiling. "Peter," she added thoughtfully, "has kissed us all,
now and then!" She stooped for a dutiful good-night kiss, and was
gone. And as she went, lightly and swiftly across the hall, up the
stairway with her shoulders erect, and methodically and prettily
moved about her brushing and folding and disrobing, she saw
herself engaged to be married, saw herself veiled and mystical in
white, on her Uncle's arm, heard the old neighbours and friends
saying that little Anne Strickland had gone to her own home, and
had won the love of a fine man.

Downstairs, the doctor sat on, thinking, and his face was grave.
He was thinking of little Cherry's goodnight kiss, half an hour
ago. She had rested against his arm, and he had held her there,
but what had been the thoughts behind the blue eyes so near his
own? Perhaps Anne was right--perhaps Anne was right. But he
realized with a great rush of fear that some man had kissed Cherry
to-night, had held her against a tobacco-scented coat, and that
the girl was a woman, and an awakened woman at that. Cherry--
kissed a man! Her father's heart winced away from the thought.

Young Lloyd and Peter had walked home with her. But if Anne was
right in her maidenly suspicions of Lloyd's intentions, then it
must have been Peter who surprised little Cherry with a sudden
embrace. Lloyd had been hurrying for a train, too; the case looked
clear for Peter.

And as he came to his conclusions, a certain relief crept into the
old man's heart. Peter was an odd fellow; he was ten years too old
for the child. But Peter was a lover of books and gardens and
woods and music, after all, and Peter's father and this old man
musing by the fire had been "Lee" and "Paul" to each other since
boyhood. Peter might give Cherry a kiss as innocently as a
brother; in any case, Peter would wait for her, would be all
consideration and tenderness when he did win her.

"But I think perhaps she might go down to the San Jose school for
half a term," her father reflected. "Six months there did wonders
for Alix. No use precipitating things--the next few years are
pretty important for all the girls. We mustn't let her fancy that
the first man who turns her head with compliments is the right
partner for life! Alix, now--somehow she wasn't like Cherry, at
eighteen."

He smiled at a sudden memory of Alix, who was chicken-farming at
that age, and generally unpleasantly redolent of incubators,
chopped feed, and mire. He seemed to remember Alix shouting that
if Peter Joyce was going to LIVE in their house, she would move
somewhere else! Cherry was different.

Cherry, he reflected fearfully, was as pretty as her mother had
been at eighteen, with the same rounded chin and apricot cheeks,
and the same shadowed innocent blue eyes with a film of corn-
coloured hair blown across them. She had the strange, the
indefinable quality that without words, almost without glances,
draws youth toward youth, draws admiration and passion, draws life
and all its pain. Her father for the first time to-night
formulated in his heart the thought that she might be happily
married--

Married--nonsense! Why, what did she know of life, of submission
and courage and sacrifice? At the first strain, at the first real
test, she would want to run home to her Daddy again, to "stop
playing"--! It would be years, many years, before the snowy
frills, and the pale gold head, and the firm, brown little hand
would be ready for that!

Not many hours after he went slowly up to bed morning began to
creep into the little valley. The redwoods turned gray, and then
dark green, the fog stirred, and a first shaft of bright sunlight
struck across a shoulder of the hills, and pierced the shadows
about the brown bungalow. Alix, at her early bath, heard quail
calling, and looked out to see the last of the fog vanishing at
eight o'clock, and to get a wet rush of fragrance from the Persian
lilac, blooming this year for the first time. At half-past eight
she came out into the garden, to find her father somewhat ruefully
studying the tumbled ruins of the yellow banksia rose. The garden
was still wet, but warming fast; she picked a plume of dark and
perfumed heliotrope, and began to fasten it in his coat lapel
while she kissed him.

"We'll never get that back on the roof, my dear boy," Alix said
maternally.

Her father pursed his lips, shook his head doubtfully. The rose, a
short, week ago, had been spreading fan-like branches well toward
the ridge-pole, a story and a half above their heads. But the
great wind of yestereve that had ended the spring and brought in
the summer had dragged it from its place and flung it, a jumble of
emerald leaves and sweet clusters of creamy blossoms, across the
path and the steps of the porch. Alix looked up at the outward
curve of the reversed branches, bent almost to the splitting point
in the unfamiliar direction, and whistled. She tentatively tugged
at a loose spray, and stood biting her thumb.

"Why it should have kept its place for fifteen years and then
suddenly flopped, is a mystery to me!" she observed resentfully.

"Well, the truth is," her father confessed, "you were quite right
last night. When I pruned it, a week ago, I may have undermined
it."

"You never will listen to reason!" his daughter remarked absently,
her attention distracted by the setter puppy who came clumsily
gambolling toward her. "Hello, old Bumpydoodles!" she added, with
rich affection, kissing the dog's silky head, and burying both
hands in his feathered collar. "Hello, old Buck!"

"Alexandra, for heaven's sake stop handling that brute!" said
Peter Joyce disgustedly, coming up the path. "I dare say you've
not had your breakfast, either. Go wash your hands! 'Morning,
Doctor!"

Father and daughter turned to smile upon him, a tall, lean man,
with a young face and a finely groomed head, and with touches of
premature silver at his temples. He was very much at home here,
had been their closest friend for many years.

He was a bachelor, just entering his thirties, a fastidious,
critical, exacting man by reputation, but showing his best side to
the Stricklands. They had a vague idea that he was rich, according
to their modest standard, but he apparently had no extravagant
tastes, and lived as quietly, or more quietly, than they did. He
had a brown cabin, up on the mountain, where two or three
Portuguese boys and an old, fat Chinese cook managed his affairs,
and he sometimes spoke of friends at the club, or brought two or
three men home with him for a visit. But for the most part he
liked solitude, books, music, dogs, and his fireside. The old
doctor's one social enjoyment was in visiting Peter, and the
younger man went to no other place so steadily as he came to the
old house under the redwoods.

The girls accepted him unquestioningly, sometimes resenting his
frank criticism, sometimes grateful for the entertaining he
delighted to do for them, but most often ignoring him, as if he
had been an uncle whose place and standing in the domestic circle
was unquestioned, but who did not really enter into their young
plans and lives. He was whimsically, good-naturedly disapproving
of Alexandra, and he frankly did not like Anne, but he had always
been especially indulgent to Cherry, and had taken the subject of
Cherry's schooling and development very seriously. And Cherry
treated him, in return, as if she had been his demure and
mischievous and affectionate daughter.

"'Morning, Peter!" said Doctor Strickland now, smiling at him.
"Have you had yours?"

"My house," said Mr. Joyce fastidiously, "is a well-managed
place."

"Of course," Alix said, panting from her welcome to the dog, and
laughing at the newcomer without resentment, "of course it is, for
the President Emeritus of the Maiden Ladies' Guild is running it!"

"Don't be insulting," Peter answered, in the same mood. "Say," he
added, pursing his lips to whistle, as he looked at the rose tree,
"did Tuesday's wind do that?"

"Tuesday's wind and Dad," Alix answered. "Will it go back, Peter?"

"I--I don't know!" he mused, walking slowly about the wreck. "If
we had a lever down here, and some fellow on the roof with a rope,
maybe."

"Mr. Lloyd is coming over!" Alix announced. Peter nodded absently,
but the mention of Martin Lloyd reminded him that they had all
dined at his house on the very evening when the mysterious gale
had commenced, and with interest he asked:

"Cherry catch cold coming home Tuesday night?"

"No; she squeezed in between Dad and me, and was as warm as
toast!" Alix answered casually. "How'd you like Mr. Lloyd?" she
added.

"Nice fellow!" Peter answered. Alix grinned. She had before this
accused Peter of violent partisanship with his own sex. He
criticized women severely; the Strickland girls had often been
angry and resentful at his comments upon the insincerity,
extravagance, and ignorance of their own sex, but with Peter, all
men were worthy of respect, until otherwise proved.

"He's awfully nice," Alix agreed.

"Who is he?" Peter asked curiously. "Where are his people and all
that?"

"His people live in Portland," the girl answered. "He's a mining
engineer, and he's waiting now to be called to El Nido; he's to be
at a mine there. He's lots of fun--when you know him, really!"

"Talking of the new Prince Charming, of course," Anne said,
joining them, and linking an arm in her Uncle's and in Alix's arm.
"Don't bring that puppy in, Alix, please! Breakfast, Uncle Lee.
Come and have another cup of coffee, Peter!"

"Prince Charming, eh?" Peter echoed thoughtfully, as they all
turned toward a delicious drift of the odour of bacon and coffee,
and crossed the porch to the dining room. "I was going down for
the mail, but now I'll have to stay and see this rose matter
through! Thanks, Anne, but I'll watch you."

"Afraid of getting fatter?" Alix speculated, shaking out her
napkin. "You ARE fatter," she added, with a calm conviction.

"Do you always say the thing that will give the most offence?"
Peter asked, annoyed. "Where's Cherry?" he added, glancing about.

Cherry answered the question herself by trailing in in a Japanese
wrapper, and beginning to drink her coffee with bare, slender arms
resting on the table. Nobody protested, the adored youngest was
usually given her way. Alix's indifference to the niceties of her
toilet had been seriously combated, years ago, but Cherry was so
young, and so pretty in any dress or undress, that it was
impossible to regard her little lapses with any gravity. Moreover,
the family realized perfectly that Alix would have clipped her
thick hair, and taken to bloomers or knickerbockers outright, at
the slightest encouragement, and would gladly have breakfasted in
a wrapper, or in her petticoats, or while about the woods with her
dogs, whereas nobody could know Cherry and not know that every
weakness of which the feminine heart is capable, for frills and
toilet waters, creams and laces, was dormant under the childish
negligence.

"I heard you all laughing, under the window and it--woke--me--up!"
Cherry said dreamily.

"It seems to me," Anne, who had been eying her uneasily, said
lightly, "that someone I know is getting pretty old to come
downstairs in that rig when strangers are here!"

"It seems to me this is just as decent as lots of things--bathing
suits, for instance!" Cherry returned instantly, gathering the
robe about her, and giving Anne a resentful glance over her blue
cup.

"Peter, are you a stranger?" Alix said. "If Peter's a stranger,"
she added animatedly, "what is an intimate friend? Peter walks
through this house at all hours; you can't wash your hair or do a
little ironing without having Peter under your feet; he borrows
money from me; he bullies Hong about wasting butter--"

"Also you borrow money from me, my child, don't forget that,"
Peter interrupted serenely, peeling an apple. "I don't come to see
YOU, Alix."

"I have a rope somewhere--" the doctor ruminated. "Where did I put
that long rope--what did I have it for, in the first place--"

"You had it to guy the apple tree," Alix reminded him. "Don't you
remember you got a regular ship's cable to tie that tree, and it
never worked? The tree that died after all--"

"Ah, yes!" said her father, his attentive face brightening. "Ah,
yes! Now WHERE is that rope?" But even as Alix observed that she
had seen it somewhere, and advanced a tentative guess as to the
cellar, his eyes fell upon Cherry, and went from Cherry's absorbed
face--for she was dreaming over her breakfast--to Peter, and he
wondered if Peter HAD kissed her.

"Come on, let's get at it!" Alix exclaimed with relish. She loved
a struggle of any description, had prepared for this one with
sleeves rolled to the elbows, and had put on heavy shoes and her
briefest skirt. "Come on, Sweetums," she added, to the dog, who
had somehow wormed his way into the dining room, and was beating
the floor with an obsequious tail. She caught his forepaws, and he
whipped his beautiful tail between his legs, and looked about with
agonized eyes while she dragged him through a clumsy dance. "He's
the darlingest pup we ever had!" Alix stated to Cherry, who was
departing for the upper regions and a complete costume.

"He needs a bath," Anne observed coldly, and Peter's abrupt shout
of laughter made Alix flush angrily.

"Bring your cigarette out here, Peter," the old doctor said,
crossing the garden to look in the abandoned greenhouse for his
rope. "We're in no hurry," he said. "We may as well wait until
Lloyd comes along; the fellow's arms are like flails. You---" the
old man opened a reluctant door, peered into a glassed space
filled with muddy shelves and empty flower-pots and spiderwebs.
"It's not here," he stated. Then he began again, "You brought
Cherry home last night?" he asked.

"As a matter of fact, I didn't," Peter answered, in his quick,
precise tones. "I came with Lloyd and Cherry as far as the bridge,
then I cut up the hill. Why?" he added sharply. "What's up?"

"Nothing's up," Doctor Strickland said slowly. "But I think that
Lloyd admires--or is beginning to admire--her," he said.

"Who--Cherry!" Peter exclaimed, with distaste and incredulity in
his tone.

"You don't think so?" the doctor, looking at him wistfully, asked
eagerly.

"Why, certainly not!" Peter said quickly. "Certainly not," he
added, frowning, with his eyes narrowed, and his look fixed upon
the vista of woodland.

"I had a fancy that he might have been putting notions into her
head," her father said, anxious to be reassured.

"But--great Scott!" Peter said, his face very red, "she's much
younger than Anne and Alix--"

"It doesn't always go by that," the doctor suggested.

"No, I know it doesn't," Peter answered in his quick, annoyed
fashion.

"I should be sorry," Cherry's father admitted.

"Sorry!" Peter echoed impatiently. "But it's quite out of the
question, of course! It's quite out of the question. You mustn't--
we mustn't--let ourselves get scared about the first man that
looks at her. She--she wouldn't consider him for an instant," he
suddenly decided in great satisfaction. "You mustn't forget that
she has something to do with it! Very fastidious, Cherry. She's
not like other girls!"

"That's true--that's true!" Doctor Strickland agreed, in great
relief. They turned back toward the garden, in time to meet Alix
and several dogs streaming across the clearing. Over the girl's
shoulder was coiled the great rope; she leaped various logs and
small bushes as she came, and the dogs barked madly and leaped
with her. Breathless, she stumbled and fell into her father's
arms, and both men had the same thought, one that made them smile
upon her tomboyishness indulgently: "If this is twenty-one--
eighteen is three long years younger and less responsible!"




CHAPTER II


Immediately they gathered by the fallen rose vine, all talking and
disputing at once. Alix and the dogs added only noise to the
confusion; the men debated, measured, and doubted; Anne, busy with
household duties, came and went smilingly. About them stretched
the forest, wrapped in the summer morning stillness that is really
compounded of a thousand happy sounds. There was no fog now; warm
spokes of sunshine fell brightly into the dim, glowing heart of
the woods; bees and birds murmured on short journeys; aromatic
sweetness drifted on the air.

They had known a thousand such mornings, the doctor and his girls,
still, exquisite, happy, dedicated to some absurd undertaking.
They had built chicken pens, they had dammed or cleared the creek,
they had felled bay-trees, and lopped the lower branches of the
redwoods, they had built roaring bonfires, or painted the porch
floor, and many times they had roasted chops or potatoes at the
brick oven, and feasted royally in the open forest.

A light rope was tied; an experimental tug broke it like a string,
tumbling Alix violently in a sitting position, and precipitating
her father into a loamy bed. Anne, who was bargaining with a
Chinese fruit vendor frankly interested in their undertaking, had
called that she would help them in a second, when behind Alix, who
was still sitting on the ground, another voice offered help.

A young man had come into the doctor's garden; work was stopped
for a few minutes while they welcomed Martin Lloyd.

He was tall and fair, broad, but with not an ounce of extra
weight, with brown eyes always laughing, and a ready friendliness
always in evidence. He was dressed becomingly to-day, in a brown
army shirt open at the throat, and shabby golf trousers that met
his thick woollen stockings at the knee. Anne's heart gave a throb
of approval as she studied him; Alix flushed furiously, scowled a
certain boyish approval; Cherry had not come down.

"Can you help us?" The doctor echoed his question doubtfully. "I
don't know that it can be done!" he admitted.

"This shameless old man has just confessed that he gouged the
heart out of the poor tree a week ago," Alix said, getting to her
feet. "That's the first use he put his birthday knife to! And Anne
stood here and abetted him, as far as I can find out!"

"How you garble things, Alix!" Anne said, giving her hand to
Martin. "I came out here to find my uncle busily pruning and
chopping the dead underwood away, but I had no more to do with it
than you had!"

"What's that you're eating--an apricot?" Martin said to Anne, in
his laughing way. "I was going to say that if it was a peach, you
are a cannibal!"

"Oh, help!" Alix ejaculated, with a look of elaborate scorn.

"No, but where were you last night?" Martin added in a lower tone
when he and Anne could speak unnoticed. The happy colour flooded
her face.

"I have to take care of my family SOMETIMES!" she reminded him
demurely. "Wasn't Cherry a good substitute?"

"Cherry's adorable!" he agreed heartily.

"Isn't she sweet?" Anne asked enthusiastically. "She's only a
little girl, really, but she's a little girl who is going to have
a lot of attention some day!" she added, in her most matronly
manner.

Martin did not answer, but turning briskly toward the doctor, he
devoted himself to the business in hand. Peter had climbed on an
inverted barrel, to inspect and advise. Alix dashed upstairs for
nails and hammer; the doctor whittled pegs; Martin measured the
comparative strength of ropes and branches with a judicial eye and
hand. Anne flitted about, suggesting, commenting, her pretty
little head tipped to one side.

They were all deep in the first united tug, each person placed
carefully by the doctor, and guys for the rope driven at intervals
decided by Martin, when there was an interruption for Cherry's
arrival on the scene. With characteristic coquetry she did not
approach, as the others had, by means of the front porch and the
garden path, but crept from the study window into a veritable
tunnel of green bloom, and came crawling down it, as sweet and
fragrant, as lovely and as fresh, as the roses themselves. She
wore a scant pink gingham that had been a dozen times to the tub,
and was faded and small; it might have been a regal mantle and
diadem without any further enhancing her extraordinary beauty. Her
bright head was hidden by a blue sunbonnet, assumed, she explained
later, because the thorns tangled her hair; but as, laughing and
smothered with roses, she crept into view, the sunbonnet slipped
back, and the lovely, flushed little face, with tendrils of gold
straying across the white forehead, and mischief gleaming in the
blue, blue eyes was framed only in loosened pale gold hair.

Years afterward Alix remembered her so, as Martin Lloyd helped her
to spring free of the branches, and she stood laughing at their
surprise and still clinging to his hand. "The day we raised the
rose tree" had a place of its own in Alix's memory, as a time of
carefree fun and content, a time of perfume and sunshine--perhaps
the last time of its kind that any one of them was to know.

Cherry looked at Martin daringly as she joined the labourers; her
whole being was thrilling to the excitement of his glance; she was
hardly conscious of what she was doing or saying. Under her
father's direction she tied ropes, presently was placed with her
arms clasped tightly about a great sheaf of vines, ready for the
united tug. Martin came close to her, in the general confusion.

"How's my little sweetheart this morning?"

Cherry looked up, her throat contracted, she looked down again,
unable to speak. She had been waiting for his first word; now that
it had come it seemed so far richer and sweeter than her wildest
dream.

"How can I see you a minute?" Martin murmured, snapping his big
knife shut.

"I have to walk down for the mail--" stammered Cherry, conscious
only of Martin and herself.

Both Peter and her father were watching her with an uneasiness and
suspicion that had sprung into being full-blown. Both men were
asking themselves what they knew of this strange young man who was
suddenly a part of their intimate little world.

He was simply a man; not unusual in any apparent way. He was ready
with his words, fairly good-looking, clean and muscular, his
evident lack of polish in languages and letters atoned for by his
quick wit, and by a certain boyish artlessness and ingenuousness.
He represented himself as about to receive an excellent salary at
the mine at El Nido, two thousand a year, but also admitted
cheerfully that he was always "broke." He had distinguished
himself at college, but had left it after only two years, upon
being offered a promising position. There was nothing especially
to admire in him, nothing especially to blame; under other
circumstances Peter and the doctor might have pronounced him as
one of the least interesting of human specimens. The beauty of
childhood and adolescence were gone, the ripeness given by years
and suffering was wanting; Martin Lloyd was just, as he himself
laughingly remarked, "one of the fellers."

Peter had secretly criticized him because he used the words
"'phone" and "photo" and "'Frisco," but in justice he had to admit
to himself that there was no particular significance to the
criticism. He also, in his secret heart, had a vague, dissatisfied
feeling that Lloyd was a man who held women, as a class, rather in
disrespect, and had probably had his experiences with them, but
there was no way of expressing, much less governing, his conduct
toward Martin by so purely speculative a prejudice. The young man
had dined at his house a few nights ago, had shown an admiration,
if not an appreciation, for music, had talked with sufficient
intelligence about political matters, mining, and--what else?
photography, and pullman cars, and the latest wreck off Bolinas--
just the random conversation that was apt to trail through a
country dinner. He had told a Chinese joke well, and essayed an
Irish joke not so successfully. Peter, somewhat appalled, in the
sunny garden, struggling with the banksia, decided that this was
not much to know of a person who might have the audacity to fall
in love with an exquisite and innocent Cherry. After all, she
would not be a little girl forever, some man would want to take
that little corn-coloured head and that delicious little pink-clad
person away with him some day, to be his wife--

And suddenly Peter was torn by a stab of pure pain, and he stood
puzzled and sick, in the garden bed, wondering what was happening
to him.

"Listen--want a drink?" Alix asked, coming out with a tin dipper
that spilled a glittering sheet of water down on the thirsty
nasturtiums. "Rest a few minutes, Peter. Dad wanted a pole, and
Mr. Lloyd has gone up into the woods to cut one."

"And where's Cherry?" Peter asked, drinking deep.

"She went along--just up in the woods here!" Alix answered. "Dad
had to answer the telephone, but they're going to yell if they
need help! WELL!" and Alix, panting, sat down on a log, "are we
going to do it?"

"We ought to go up and help Lloyd," Peter decreed. "Which way did
he go?"

"I don't know, darling!" Alix answered, leaning back, crossing her
ankles, and yawning. "But they'll be back before you could get
there. They've been gone five minutes!"

Only five minutes, but they were enough to take Cherry and her
lover out of sight of the house, enough to have him put his arm
about her, and to have her raise her lips confidently, and yet
shyly, again to his. They kissed each other deeply, again and
again. The girl was a little confused and even a little uneasy as
he continued the tight grip on his arm about her, and her upward
look found his eyes close to her own.

Their talk was incoherent. Cherry was still playing, coquetting
and smiling, her words few, and Martin, having her so near, could
only repeat the endearing phrases that attempted to express to her
his love and fervour.

"You darling! Do you know how I love you? You darling--you little
exquisite beauty! Do you love me--do you love me?" Martin
murmured, and Cherry answered breathlessly:

"You know I do--but you know I do!"

Presently he selected the sapling redwood, and brought it down
with two blows of his axe. The girl seated herself beside him,
helped him strip the trunk, their hands constantly touching, the
man once or twice delaying her for one more snatched and laughing
kiss.

"But, Martin, you've been engaged before?" Cherry asked.

"Never--on my honour! But yes, I was once, too, years ago. I want
to tell you about that--"

He told her, her grave face bent over the redwood boughs she was
tearing. She nodded, flushed, paled. He had met this girl at his
mother's, do you see? And she was a cute little thing, don't you
know? Her name was Dorothy King, and when he went back to college
she had promised to write, do you see? But she hadn't written for
weeks, and then she had written to say that she was engaged to
another man, a man named--named--he had forgotten the name. But
she had married him all right---

And Cherry looked up, laughing almost reproachfully. How could he
ever forget her married name! Cherry said that she suspected that
Martin hadn't really cared, and he said no, but he had wanted to
tell her about it all the same, because knowing her had made him
want really to be honest--and to be good--

Tears stood in his eyes, and she forgave him his admiration for
Dorothy King, and said that she knew he was good. And Martin said
that he was going to make her the happiest wife a man ever had.

Dragging the stripped tree, they ran down the sharp hill to the
house just as Anne came out to announce luncheon. Peter was
wandering off in the woods nearby, but came at Alix's shrill yell
of summons, and looked relieved when he saw Cherry and Martin not
even talking to each other. They had been gone only ten minutes.

Anne, who did not like Peter, had decided not to ask him to stay,
but Peter had calmly taken his usual place, and had annoyed Anne
with his familiar questioning of Hong as to the amount of butter
needed in batter bread. It was a happy meal for everyone, and
after it they had attacked the rose bush again, with aching
muscles now, and in the first real summer heat. It was three
o'clock before, with a great crackling, and the scream of a
twisted branch, and a general panting and heaving on the part of
the workers, at last the feathery mass had risen a foot--two feet-
-into the air, had stood tottering like a wall of bloom, and
finally, with a downward rush, had settled to its old place on the
roof. Hong was pressed into service now, and with Martin, was on
the roof, grappling with a rope, shouting directions. A shower of
tiny blossoms and torn leaves covered the steps of the office-
porch, the garden beds were trampled deep, the seven labourers
breathless and exhausted. But the rose vine was in place! Alix
shouted congratulations to Martin as he busily roped and tied the
recaptured masses in their old position. Anne had vanished for
sandwiches; Peter was being scientifically bandaged by the doctor.
Cherry stood looking up at the roof; she did little talking; she
watched Martin during every second he spent there.

Her small heart was bursting with excitement. He had found easy
opportunities to talk to her a dozen times under cover of the
general noise. He had said wonderful and thrilling things.

"How is my own girl? Sweetheart, you're the sweetest rose of them
all! Cherry, do you suppose they can see from our faces how happy
we are?" Little sentences that meant nothing when other lips spoke
them, but that his voice made immortal.

Looking up at him, she thought of the glorious days ahead. How
they would all wonder and exclaim; yes, and how the girls would
envy her! Little Cherry, just eighteen, going to be married, and
married to a man that Alix or Anne would have been only too glad
to win! A real man, from the outside world, a man of twenty-eight,
ten years older than she was. And how the letters and presents and
gowns and plans would begin to flutter through the bungalow--she
would be married in cafe-au-lait rajah cloth, as Miss Pinckney in
San Francisco was; she would be Mrs. Lloyd! She could chaperone
Alix and Anne--

There was a rending, slipping noise on the roof, a scream from
Martin, and shouts from the doctor and Peter. With a great sliding
and rushing of the refractory sprays, and with a horrifying
stumbling and falling, down came Martin, caught in a great rope of
the creeper, almost at her feet.

A time of great running and calling ensued. Cherry dropped on her
knees beside him, and had his head on her arm for a moment; then
her father took her place, and Alix, with an astonished look at
the younger girl's wet eyes, drew her sister away. Immediately
afterward Martin sat up, looked bewilderedly about from one face
to another, looked at his scratched wrist and said "Gee!" in a
thoughtful tone. Anne, coming out with sandwiches, joined in the
general laugh.

"You scared Cherry out of ten years' growth!" Alix reproached
Martin.

"I--I thought he might have hurt himself!" Cherry said, in the
softest of little-girl voices, and with her shy little head
hanging. Anne decided that it was becoming her clear duty to talk
to Cherry.

"My dear," she said, later that same afternoon, when by chance she
was alone with her little cousin, "don't you think perhaps it
would be a little more dignified to treat Mr. Lloyd with more
formality? He likes you, dear, of course. But a man wants to
respect as well as like a pretty girl, and I am afraid--Uncle has
noticed it!" she interrupted herself quickly, as Cherry tossed her
head scornfully. "He spoke of it last night, and Alix tells me
that you are calling Mr. Lloyd 'Martin!' Now, dearie, Martin Lloyd
is fully ten years---"

"Then Alix is a tattle-tale!" Cherry said childishly.

"I don't know about that," Anne said gently, although perhaps it
would have been more generous in her to add that Alix had made the
comment gleefully, and almost admiringly. "But that isn't
important. The point is that you are only a young girl--"

"I wish you would all mind your own royal business for about five
seconds!" Cherry said, rudely and impatiently. She was in her own
room, rummaging on the upper shelf of the closet for a certain
hat. She secured the hat now, and ran unceremoniously away from
her admonitor, to join Alix, Peter, and Martin for the daily
ceremony of walking into the village for the mail.

Anne followed her downstairs sedately, perhaps a little dashed
presently to discover that this dignified proceeding had lost her
the walk. They were all gone. The house was very still, early
summer sweetness was drifting through wide-opened windows and
doors; the long day was slowly declining. In the woods close to
the door a really summery hum of insect life was stirring. Hong,
in dull minor gutturals, jabbered somewhere in the far distance to
a friend. Anne peeped into the deserted living room, softened
through all its pleasant shabbiness into real beauty by the shafts
of sunset red that came in through the casement windows; and was
deliberating between various becoming occupations--for Martin
might walk back with the girls--when her uncle called her.

He was sitting in the little room that was still called his
office, but that was really his study now, and the late afternoon
light, through the replaced rose vine, streamed in on the shabby
books and the green lampshade and the cluttered desk.

"Anne--you weren't there when that young chap tumbled. But I've
been worrying about it a little. There's no question--there's no
question that she--that Cherry--called him by his name. 'Martin,'
she called him."

Anne had crossed to the shadowy doorway; she stood still.

"It can't be!" protested the doctor, uneasily. "Did Alix say
anything to you about it?"

"She said that," Anne admitted, drily.

"You've not noticed anything between him and Cherry?" pursued the
doctor. "A girl might call a man by his name, I suppose--"

"I don't think there has been anything to notice," Anne stated, in
a level tone.

"You don't?" the doctor echoed, in relief, peering at her. She
could meet his look with a smile, but in her heart were the same
thoughts that Cherry had been innocently indulging, under the rose
vine an hour ago, and the dream that had been Heaven to Cherry was
Purgatory to Anne. Cherry married, Cherry receiving cups and
presents and gowns, Cherry, Mrs. Lloyd, with a plain gold ring on
her young, childish hand, Cherry able to patronize and chaperone
Alix and Anne--! "I half fancied that it might be you, Anne," her
uncle added, "although I know what a sensible little head you
have!" "I'm afraid I'm a trifle exacting where men are concerned!"
Anne said, understanding perfectly that her pride was being
shielded, but hurt to the heart, nevertheless.

"Well, it must be stopped, if it has begun," decided her uncle. "I
can't permit it--I'd forgotten how the little witch grows!"

"He isn't as eligible for Cherry as for me, then?" Anne asked
lightly. But her smile disarmed the unsuspicious old man, and he
answered honestly:

"You're quite different, Anne. You were older at eighteen than
she'll be at twenty-four; you could hold your own--you could, in a
way, make your own life! She--why, she's only an innocent little
girl; she's got dolls in the attic; we were teasing her about
turning up her hair last week!"

Again Anne was silent. It occurred to her to laugh at the
absurdity of these quick suspicions, but they had already seized
upon her with the curious tenacity of truth; already she had
accepted the fact that what yesterday would have been the
unbelievable maximum of humiliation and hurt was true to-day, and
less than the whole bitter truth!

She was not in love with Martin Lloyd; she was not as susceptible
as the much younger Cherry, and she had not had his urging to help
her to a quick surrender. But for the first time in her life she
had seen an absolutely suitable man, a man whose work, position,
looks, name, and character fitted her rather exacting standard,
and for the first time she had let herself think confidently of
being wooed and won. It was all so right, so dignified, so
fitting. She had been the light of her uncle's eyes, and the
little capable keeper of his house for years; she had been
reminding her own friends of this frequently during the past year
or two; now she was ready to step into a nest of her own.

Standing there in the doorway, she tasted the last bitter dregs of
the dream. It was all over. Anne was at the age that sets twenty-
five years as the definite boundary of spinsterhood. She would be
twenty-five in August.

Alix came in from her walk glowing, and full of a great discovery.

"Dad," she said eagerly, taking her place at the supper table,
"what do you think! I'll bet you a dollar that man is falling in
love with our Cherry!"

Anne, at the head of the table, looked pained, but there was
genuine apprehension in the doctor's face.

"Where is your sister?" he asked.

"Down there by the gate," Alix answered. "They're gazing soulfully
into each other's eyes, and all that! Peter went home. But CHERRY-
-with a beau! Isn't that the ultimate extension of the limit! I'm
crazy about it--I think it's great. An engineer, Dad, and Mrs.
North's nephew, and he has a fine job in a mine somewhere," she
summarized enthusiastically, "you couldn't ask anything better
than that, could you? Could you, Dad? I love weddings! This'll be
the third I've been to!"

"All this seems to have come up very suddenly," the doctor said,
dazedly, rumpling his gray hair with a fine old hand. "I don't
imagine your sister is taking it as seriously as you and Anne seem
inclined to---"

"Oh, does Anne think so!" Alix exclaimed.

"I think Cherry is one of the fortunate girls destined to drift
along the surface of life," Anne said, "and to accept wifehood
quite simply. I only wish I were that type--"

"Oh, Nancy, what rot you talk every time you remember you had a
year at college!" Alix said, lightly. "Can't you let the poor kid
fall in love without yapping about types and biology and the
cosmic urge---"

"Really, Alix, you use extraordinary language!" Anne remonstrated,
glancing at her uncle with outraged dignity. "And I am not aware
that I spoke of biology or the cosmic urge!" But her tone was not
as impersonal as her words, and she was flushed and even agitated.
"Shan't we begin, Uncle Lee?" she asked, patiently. "If Cherry is
just down at the gate there, she'll only be another minute--"

She was interrupted by Cherry herself. The girl came to the porch
door, and as she hesitated there a minute, with her smiling eyes
seeking her father's face, they saw that by one firm, small hand
she drew her lover beside her. Martin Lloyd's smiling face showed
above hers in the lamplight.

"Dad!" said Cherry, with a childish breath. "Dad! I've brought
Martin to supper!"




CHAPTER III


The three at the table did not move for perhaps twenty slow
seconds. Doctor Strickland, who had pushed back his chair, and
whose hands were resting on the table before him, stared at them
steadily. Anne, with a quick little hiss of surprise, smiled
faintly. Alix, the unstilted, widened her eyes, and opened her
mouth in unaffected astonishment. For there was no mistaking
Cherry's tone.

"Doctor," said Martin, coming in, "this little girl of yours and I
have something to tell you!" The old man looked at him sharply,
almost sternly, looked about at the girls' faces, and was silent.
But he tightened his arm about Cherry, who had fluttered to the
arm of his chair.

"Are you surprised, Daddy?" Cherry laughed, with all a child's
innocent exultation. The next instant Anne and Martin were shaking
hands, and Alix had enveloped Cherry in an enthusiastic embrace.

"Surprised!" exclaimed Alix. "Why, aren't you surprised yourself!"

Her sister flushed exquisitely, and Martin laughed.

"We're just about knocked silly!" he confessed, and all the girls
laughed joyously.

There followed a delighted confusion of talk, when each in turn
remembered what she had noticed, what she had suspected, and what
her first emotion had been at this moment or that. Meanwhile a
place was made for Martin, and biscuits and omelette and honey and
tea were put into brisk circulation. Cherry left her place beside
her father, with a final kiss, and took her own chair, all
dimples, flushes, smiles, and shy confidence.

"And what are your plans?" Anne asked maternally, as she poured
tea.

Her uncle, who had been silent during the excitement, mildly
interposed:

"I think we needn't go too fast, young people! You've only known
each other a few weeks, after all; you must be pretty sure of
yourselves before taking anything like a decisive step. Plenty of
time--plenty of time. Mr. Lloyd can go back to his mine, and
Cherry will wait for him--"

Cherry's wild-rose face coloured, and her whole body drooped.

"But I can be getting ready, and I can tell people, Dad?" she
pleaded.

"We'll see," her father promised her, soothingly. He had promised
her thus vaguely when, as an imperative baby years ago, she had
wanted the impossible. But she was not a baby now.

"Ah, now--that won't do!" she pouted.

"You must give me a little time to get used to the idea of losing
my baby, pretty," her father said. "I confess that this thing
seems to have come upon me rather unexpectedly. Mr. Lloyd here and
I must have some talks about his plans--"

"I know exactly how you feel, Doctor," Martin said, sensibly and
sympathetically. "I realize that I should have come to you first,
and asked to pay my respects to your daughter--laugh, why don't
you?" he added to Alix, from whom an abrupt and startling laugh
had indeed escaped in good-natured scorn.

"Nobody does that any more!" the girl said, in self-defence. "It
sounded so old-fashioned!"

"Perhaps nobody does it any more, but I should have done it,"
Martin said briskly and seriously. "Except that it all came over
me with such a rush. A week ago Cherry was only a most attractive
child, to me. I'd spoken to my aunt about her and had said that I
envied the man that was some day to win her, and that was all!
Then the time came for me to get back to work--and I found I
couldn't go! I couldn't leave her. However, I expect to be back
here some time in the fall, and I thought to myself that I'd see
her then, and perhaps, THEN--And then came last night, when I
began to say good-byes, and--it happened! I know that you all
hardly know me, and I know that Cherry is pretty young to settle
down, but I think I can satisfy you, Doctor, that you give her
into safe hands, and I believe she'll never regret trusting me!"

He had gotten to his feet as he spoke, and was holding the back of
his chair, looking anxiously and eagerly into the old man's eyes.
His tone, in spite of his effort to keep it light, had taken on a
depth and gravity quite new to his hearers, and as Cherry, sitting
next him, and fired through all her girlish being by his
eloquence, turned to lay a small, warm hand on his own, the tears
came to his eyes.

"Well--" said the doctor, touched himself, and in his gentlest
tone, "well! It had to come, perhaps, I can't promise her to you
very soon, Mr. Lloyd. But if you both are willing to wait, and if
time proves this to be the real feeling, I don't believe you'll
find me hard on you!"

"That's all I ask, sir!" Martin said, resuming his seat and his
dinner. And for the rest of the meal harmony and gaiety reigned.

Alix shot an occasional glance at Anne, who was flushed, but as
usual busy and charming over the tea cups. Alix knew that Anne was
inwardly writhing; indeed she felt a sort of emotional shock
herself. Yesterday the mere talk of a lover for any one of them
was delightfully thrilling and vague--to-night Cherry was actually
engaged! The older girls' romantic speculations were flat enough
now; Cherry had the actual thing.

There was no jealousy in Alix's heart, as there definitely was in
Anne's, of the man. But Alix felt envious of the superior
experience--why, he would kiss Cherry! No man had ever kissed
Alix. Cherry would be the admired and envied girl among all the
girls; married at eighteen, it was so beautifully flattering and
satisfying to be married young!

She looked at her father's face, a troubled face to-night. He was
watching the lovers regretfully; he did not disguise it. Their
quick plans, the readiness with which they solved the tremendous
problems to come, the light-heartedness with which they were
hurrying toward the future--had he and the older Charity been like
that, twenty-five years ago, when they had had supper at her
mother's house, and told the great news? He remembered himself, an
eager, enthusiastic lover--had he really given better promise then
than this handsome young fellow was giving to-night? He tried to
remember the older Charity's mother; what she had said, what
expression her face had worn, and it seemed to him that he could
dimly recall reluctance and pain and gravity in that long-ago
look.

After dinner Cherry and Martin, in all the ecstatic first delight
of recognized love, went out to the wide front porch, where there
were wicker chairs, under the rose vines. Alix alone laughed at
them as they went. Anne, with a storm in her heart, played noisily
on the piano, and the doctor, after giving the doorway where
Cherry had disappeared a wistful look, restlessly took to his
armchair and his book, in such desolation of spirit as he had not
known since the dark day of her mother's death.

The next day Alix and the engaged pair walked up to invite Peter
to a tennis foursome on the old Blithedale court. It was a
Saturday, and as he usually dined with them, or asked them to dine
with him on Saturday, they were not surprised to find him busy
with a charcoal burner, under the trees, compounding a marvellous
dish of chicken, tomatoes, cream, and mushrooms, or to have his
first words a caution not to tip things over if they wanted any
dinner. His Chinese cook was hovering about, but Peter himself was
chef.

"Stop your messing one second!" Alix said, catching him by the
arm. And as he straightened up she added, with a little awkward
laugh, "Congratulate these creatures--they--they're going to be
married! Why don't you congratulate them!"

Peter gave one long look at Martin and Cherry, who stood laughing,
but a little confused and self-conscious, too, in the grassy path.
With a shock like death in his heart, he realized that it was all
over. Their protection of her, their suspicions, had come too
late. Blind child that she was, she was committed to this
fascinating and mysterious adventure.

His face grew dark with a sudden rush of blood. "Peter hates to
have any one else know a thing before he does!" Alix explained
this later. But he went to them quickly, and shook hands with
Martin, and was presently reproaching Cherry for her secretiveness
in his old, or almost his old, way.

"Of course nobody's to know--Dad insisted on that!" said Cherry's
soft, proud little voice.

"Did you suspect yesterday, Peter?" Alix asked, tasting the sauce,
and bunching her fingers immediately afterward to send a rapturous
kiss into the air as an indication of its deliciousness.
"Yesterday when they went off after the tree, I mean?"

"I had my own suspicions!" he returned, and Cherry--his little,
gay, lovely Cherry!--laughed happily. He arranged that they were
to play the tennis here on his own courts, and later dine with
him, but under his hospitality and under the golden beauty of the
day it was all pain--pain--pain. It was agony to see her with him,
beginning to taste the rapture of love given and returned; it was
agony to have the conversation return always to Martin and Cherry,
to the first love affair. When they wandered away to the brook,
and stood talking, the girl's head dropped, her cheek flushed, but
her face raised quickly now and then for a flashing look, Peter
felt that he could have killed this newcomer, this thief, this
usurper of the place that he himself might have filled.

"Dad's always said he disapproved of long engagements," Alix
commented, amusedly, "but you ought to hear him now! This thing--
he won't even call it an engagement--it's an understanding, or a
preference--is to be a profound secret, and Cherry's to be twenty-
one before any one else but ourselves knows--"

"Your father is quite right!" Peter said sharply, in his most
elderly manner. They were resting after the first set, and Cherry
and Martin, in the opposite court, were out of hearing.

"When your hair gets tossed back that way," Alix observed
innocently, "lots more gray shows! I think you're turning gray
pretty young, Peter, aren't you? Are you forty yet? You're not
forty, are you?"

"I'm thirty-six," Peter answered briefly. "My father was gray at
twenty-seven!" he added, after a pause.

"I have a gray hair," Alix started. "People talk about the first
gray hair--"

Peter did not hear her. There was beginning of a little hope in
his heart. Girls did not always fulfill their first engagements,
did not often do so, in fact. The thing was a secret; it might
well come to nothing, after all.

That was the beginning, and after it, although it was arranged
between them all that nothing should be changed, and that nobody
but themselves should share the secret, somehow life seemed
different. Two or three days after the momentous day of the
raising of the rose tree, Martin Lloyd went to his mine at El
Nido, and the interrupted current of life in the brown bungalow
supposedly found its old groove.

But nothing was the same. The doctor, in the first place, was more
silent and thoughtful than the girls had ever seen him before.
Anne and Alix knew that he was not happy about Cherry's plans, if
the younger girl did not. He sighed, sat silently looking off from
his book in the summer evenings, fell into deep musing even at his
meals. With Alix only he talked of the engagement, and she knew
from his comments, his doubtful manner, that he felt it to be a
mistake. The ten years' difference between Cherry and Martin
distressed him; he spoke of it again and again. In June he sent
Cherry to a long-planned house-party at Menlo Park, but the girl
came back after the third day. "I didn't have any fun," she
confessed, "I had to tell Olive, about me and Martin, I mean. The
boys there were all KIDS!"

Cherry was changed, too, and not only in the expected and natural
ways, Alix thought. She had always had a generous share of the
family devotion, but she entirely eclipsed the others now. Her
daily letter from Martin, her new prospects, not only increased
her importance in the other girls' eyes, but innocently inflated
her own self-confidence. She received a diamond ring, and although
at her father's request she did not show it for a few weeks,
eventually it slipped mysteriously from the little chamois bag on
her neck, and duly appeared on her left hand. She had promised to
keep the engagement "or understanding, or preference," a profound
secret, but this was impossible. First one intimate friend and
then another was allowed to gasp and exclaim over the news. The
time came when Anne decided that it was not "decent" not to let
Martin's aunt know of it, when all these other people knew.
Finally came a dinner to the Norths', when Cherry's health was
drunk, and then the engagement presents began to come in.

"But it's July now," Cherry said, innocently, "and I think we were
pretty smart to keep it a secret so long! Don't you, Dad? And
we've been engaged three months, now, so that it looks as if
waiting wasn't going to change our minds, doesn't it?"

He could not chill her gay confidence; he had always spoiled her.
Her father only looked tenderly into the blue eyes, and tightened
his big arm protectingly about the slender young shoulders. But he
was deeply depressed. There seemed nothing to say. Cherry was of
age; she was sure of herself. She was truly in love with this
presentable young man. Doctor Strickland felt that he did not know
Martin--the man to whom he gave his lovely daughter he would have
hoped to know intimately for years. There was nothing to be said
against young Lloyd. It was only--mused the doctor, aghast--only
what was being done in the world every day. But he was staggered
by the bright readiness with which all of them--Cherry, Martin,
the other girls--accepted the stupendous fact that Cherry was to
be married.

She was quite frankly and delightedly discussing trousseau now,
too entirely absorbed in her own happiness to see that the other
girls had lives to live as well as she. Did Anne mind if she
divided her share of the silver from theirs; did Alix think she
would ever want any of Mother's lace?

"I got my cards yesterday," she said one day, "I was passing the
shop, and I thought I might as well! The woman looked at me so
queerly; she said: 'Mrs. John Martin Lloyd. Are these for your
mother?' 'No,' I said, 'they're for me!' I wish you could have
seen her look. Martin says in to-day's letter that he thinks
people will say I'm his daughter, and Alix--he says that you are
to come up to visit us, and we're going to find you a fine
husband! Won't it be funny to think of your visiting ME! Oh, and
Anne--did you see what Mrs. Fairfax sent me? A great big glorious
fur coat! She said I would need it up there, and I guess I will!
It's not new, you know; she says it isn't the real present, but it
can be cut down and it will look like new."

And so on and on. The other girls listened, sympathized, and
rejoiced, but it was not always easy. They could not get Cherry to
be interested in any of their plans for week-end house-parties,
climbs, or picnics; indeed, even to themselves their own lives
seemed a trifle dull by contrast.

Anne, as usual, took her part in the summer activities of the
village; she and Alix put on their white gowns and wide hats, and
duly descended to strawberry fetes and church fairs and concerts,
and duly laughed disarmingly when old friends expressed their
pleasant suspicions of Cherry.

But Alix voiced their feelings one summer afternoon when she was
sauntering into the village at her cousin's side, and began for
the first time a faint criticism of Martin.

"What makes Dad mad," Alix opined, "is that Martin had it all
arranged before he asked him! Took advantage of Dad, in a way. I
don't think he would have felt so if they both were kids, but
after all, Martin's twenty-eight--" Her voice fell. "Anne," she
began, hesitatingly, "sometimes when Mrs. North says so gaily that
Martin was a TERROR in college, and kept his whole family
worrying, I feel sort of sorry for Cherry! She doesn't know as
much of life as we do," twenty-one-year-old Alix finished soberly.

"I know!" Anne said quickly, perhaps a little glad to find a point
where Cherry needed sympathy.

"I have a feeling that Dad thinks," Alix pursued, "that it was
just because it was Cherry's first beau-I mean that Cherry waked
up suddenly, don't you know? It was as if she said to herself,
'Why, I'm a woman! I can get kissed and get married and all the
rest of it!'--I'm expressing this beautifully," stumbled Mix.

"I often wonder Uncle Lee doesn't forbid it!" Anne said. She had
never had even a flitting thought of such a thing before, but she
spoke now as if the engagement had had her heartiest disapproval
from the first.

"Oh, no--why should he!" Alix remonstrated. "Martin may be the
best man in the world for her. I confess," the girl added frankly,
"I can't stand his aunt. I always used to like Mrs. North, too.
But lately, when she's begun to tell Cherry that he is
extravagant, and she must save his money for him, and that he's
often been in love before, but this time she's sure it is the real
thing, and that Martin has his father's delicate stomach---"

Anne laughed out, in a merry fashion not usual with her of late.

"Oh, Alix, she DIDN'T!"

"Oh, yes, she did! And it makes me sort of sick. What does Cherry
care about anybody's delicate stomach!" Alix fell silent, broke
out again abruptly: "Anne--do you suppose she'll have a baby?"

Anne flushed. She considered this remark rather indelicate, and
yet she liked Alix's recognition of her superior knowledge of the
subject.

"I think it very likely!" she answered calmly, after a moment's
hesitation. Her first impulse had been to answer, "I think it very
unlikely!"

"She doesn't know anything about babies!" Alix said, somewhat
worried.

"I don't, either!" Anne confessed with honesty, her brow troubled.
"I've read things, here and there. I know SOMETHING, of course.
But I don't know much!"

"We've all read Dickens--and the Classic Myths, and things," Alix
submitted. "And of course she went with us the day Dad took us to
Faust! Is that about all there is to it, Nance?"

"Just--about, I guess!" Anne answered briefly. Both girls' faces
were red. They had rarely touched upon these and kindred subjects
in their talks with each other; they had never discussed them with
any one else. Anne liked to fancy herself rather worldly wise;
Alix had an independent brain and tongue. But in their household
there was no older woman to illumine their confused guessing with
an occasional word now and then, even if an unusually wholesome
out-of-door life had not distracted their attention from the
problems raised in books, and their isolation had not protected
them from the careless talk of other girls of their ages.

August brought Martin, and more changes. He was delighted with his
work in the El Nido mine, the "Emmy Younger," and everything he
had to say about it was amusing and interesting. It was still in a
rather chaotic condition, he reported, but the "stuff" was there,
and he anticipated a busy winter. He was to have a cottage, a
pretty crude affair, in a few weeks, right at the mine.

"How does that listen to you?" he asked Cherry. Cherry was sitting
beside him, at the dinner table, on the first night of his
arrival. She was thrilling still to the memory of his greeting
kiss, its fresh odour of shaving soap and witch hazel, and the
clean touch of his smooth-shaven cheek. She gave her father a
demure and interrogative glance. Martin, following it, immediately
sobered.

"Just what is your position there?" the doctor asked, pleasantly.

"A little bit of everything now," Martin answered, readily and
respectfully. "Later, of course, I shall have my own special work.
At present I'm doing some of the assaying, and have charge of the
sluice-gang. They want me to make myself generally useful, make
suggestions, take hold in every way!"

"That's the way to get on," the older man said, approvingly.
Cherry looked admiringly, with all her heart in her eyes, at her
husband-to-be; the other girls were impressed, too. Martin brought
a new element, something masculine and modern, to their quiet
dinner table. Dad and Peter were men, to be sure, but they were
different. They were only a little more dear and amusing and real
than the men in Dickens' novels, long familiar and beloved in the
household. But Martin made the girls feel suddenly in touch with
real life.

He had kissed Alix and Anne, upon arriving, and they liked it.
Both the older girls, in fact, were so impressed with the
brilliancy of Cherry's prospects, with the extraordinary
distinction she possessed in having a promised husband, with whom
to walk about the woods and to talk of the future, that they could
forgive Cherry for being wrapped in a sort of dream. Her new name,
her new state, her new clothes, and home and position filled her
thoughts, and theirs. Martin had not been with them more than a
few hours before the engagement was openly discussed, and there
were constant references to Cherry's marriage.

It was a cool evening, and after dinner they all gathered about
the fire; Martin and Cherry murmuring together in the ingle seat,
and the others only occasionally drawing them into the general
conversation. Peter and the Norths had come in for coffee, Mrs.
North giving Cherry a maternal kiss as she greeted her. Alix
thought that she had never seen her sister look so pretty; Cherry
was wearing a new dress, of golden-brown corduroy velvet, with a
deep collar and cuffs of old embroidery that had belonged to her
mother. Her silk stockings were brown, and her russet slippers
finished with square silver buckles. But it was at the lovely face
that Alix looked, the earnest, honest blue eyes, the peach-bloom
of the young cheeks, and the drooping crown of shining hair.

Somehow, a few days later, wedding plans were in the air, and they
were all taking it for granted that Cherry and Martin were to be
married almost immediately; in October, in fact. The doctor at
first persisted that the event must wait until April, but Martin's
reasonable impatience, and Cherry's plaintive "But why, Daddy?"
were too much for him. Why, indeed? Cherry's mother had been
married at eighteen, when that mother's husband was more than ten
years older than Martin Lloyd was now.

"Would ye let it go on, Peter, eh?" the doctor asked, somewhat
embarrassed, one evening when he and Peter were walking from the
train in the late September twilight.

"Lord, don't ask me!" Peter said, gruffly. "I think she's too
young to marry any one--but the mischief's done now! You can't
lock a girl in her room, and she's the sort of girl that wouldn't
be convinced by that sort of argument if you did!"

"I think I'll talk to her," her father decided. "Anything is
better than having her make a mistake. I think she'll listen to
me!" And a day or two later he called her into the study. It was a
quiet autumn morning, foggy yet warm, with a dewy, woody sweetness
in the air.

"Before we decide this thing finally," the doctor said, smiling
into her bright face, "before Martin writes his people that it's
settled, I want to ask you to do something. It's something you
won't like to do, my little girl. I want ye to wait a while--wait
a year!"

It was said. He watched the brightness fade from her glowing face,
she lowered her eyes, the line of her mouth grew firm.

"Wait until you're twenty, dear. That's young enough. I've been
planning a full winter for you girls; I wanted to take a house in
town, entertain a little, look up a few friends! You trust me,
Cherry. I only ask you to take a little time--to be sure, dear!"

Silence. She shrugged faintly, blinked the downcast eyes as if
tears stung them.

"I know you don't like Martin, Dad!" she said, tremulously.

"No, no, my darling--you mustn't say that!" he said, in distress.
"I like him very much--I think he's a thoroughly fine fellow! I
could wish--just with an old father's selfishness--that he was a
neighbour, that he didn't plan to take you away entirely. That's
natural, before I give him the thing I hold most precious in the
world. And that's just it, Cherry. Wait a year or two, and perhaps
it will be possible to establish him here near us. You'll have a
little money, dear, and Martin says himself that he would much
prefer office work to this constant changing. Marriage is a great
change, anyway. Everything is different; your point of view, your
very personality changes with it. You'll be lonely, my dear.
You'll miss your sister and Anne, and all the old friends. There
are cases where it must be so, of course. But in your case--"

He stopped, discouraged. She was sitting opposite him at the
shabby writing table, her elbows resting upon it, her full lips
pouting with disappointment. Perhaps the one phrase of her new
plans that pleased Cherry most was that she was to be carried
entirely away from the familiar atmosphere in which she would
always be "little Cherry," and subject to suggestions and
criticisms. Now she began slowly to shake her head.

"Can't take your old father's word for it?" Doctor Strickland
asked.

"It isn't that, Dad!" she protested eagerly and affectionately.
"I'll wait--I have waited! I'll wait until Christmas, or April, if
you say so! But it won't make any difference, nothing will. I love
him and he loves me, and we always will.

"You don't know," Cherry went on, with suddenly watering eyes,
"you don't KNOW what this summer of separation has meant to us
both! If we must wait longer, why, we will of course, but it will
mean that I'll never have a happy instant! It will mean that I am
just living along somehow--oh, I won't cry!" she interrupted,
smiling with wet lashes, "I'll try to bear it decently! But
sometimes I feel as if I COULDN'T bear it--"

A rush of tears choked her. She groped for a handkerchief, and
felt, as she had felt so many times, her father's handkerchief
pressed into her hand. The doctor sighed. There was nothing more
to be said.

So he gave Cherry a wedding check that made her dance with joy,
and there was no more seriousness. There were gowns, dinners,
theatre-parties, and presents; every day brought its new surprise
and new delight to Cherry. She had her cream-coloured rajah silk,
but her sister and cousin persuaded her to be married in white,
and it was their hands that dressed the first bride when the great
day came, and fastened over her corn-coloured hair her mother's
lace veil.

It was a day of soft sweetness, not too brightly summery, but warm
and still under the trees. Until ten o'clock the mountain and the
tops of the redwoods were tangled in scarfs of white fog, then the
mellow sunlight pierced it with sudden spectacular brightening and
lifting.

The little brown house was full of flowers and laughter and coming
and going. Anne and Alix, flushed and excited in their
bridesmaids' gowns, were nervous and tired. They had made lists
and addressed envelopes, had decorated the house, had talked to
milliners and florists and caterers and dressmakers, had packed
and repacked Cherry's trunk and boxes. Cherry was tired and
excited, too, but had no realization of it; she was carried along
upon a roseate cloud of happiness and excitement.

Martin's mother and stepfather had come down from Portland, and
were friendly, and pleased with everything.

"His mother," Alix told Peter, "is the sort of handsome person who
keeps a boarding-house and marries a rich, adoring old Klondike
man."

"Is that what she did?" Peter whispered, amused.

"She's only sixteen years older than Martin is!" Alix confided
further. "She kissed Cherry and said, 'You're just a baby doll,
that's what you are!' And he calls me 'Ma'am,' and Cherry
'Sister!' They've got two little children, a boy and a girl. Dad
likes them both."

"Well, that's good!" Peter approved. "Does Cherry?"

"Oh, anything that belongs to Martin is perfect!" Alix answered,
in indulgent scorn, as she abruptly departed to see to some detail
concerning the carriages, the music, or the breakfast. She and
Anne were in a constant state of worry during the morning; their
plans for seating two score of persons were changed twenty times;
they conspired in agitated whispers behind doors and in the
pantry.

But the first wedding went well. At twelve o'clock Charity
Strickland became Charity Lloyd, and was kissed and toasted and
congratulated until her lovely little face was burning with
colour, and her blue eyes were bewildered with fatigue. She stood
in the drawing-room doorway, her bouquet with its trailing ribbons
in her gloved hands, and as each one of all the old friends and
neighbours made some little pre-arranged speech of an amusing or
emotional nature, she met it with a receptive word or smile,
hardly conscious of what she did or said. Sometimes she freed her
feet from the folds of her lacy train, and sometimes gave Martin a
glance backward and upward over her shoulder, once asking him to
hold her flowers with a smile that several guests afterward
remarked showed that those two couldn't see anything in the world
but each other.

At two o'clock there were good-byes. Cherry had changed the
wedding satin for the cream-coloured rajah silk then, and wore the
extravagant hat. It would be many years before she would spend
twenty-five dollars for a hat again, and never again would she see
bronzed cocks feathers against bronzed straw without remembering
the clean little wood-smelling bedroom and the hour in which she
had pinned her wedding hat over her fair hair, and had gone,
demure and radiant and confident, to meet her husband in the old
hallway.

She was confusedly kissed, passed from hand to hand, was conscious
with a sort of strange aching at her heart that she was not only
far from saying the usual heart-broken things in farewell, but was
actually far from feeling them. She laughed at Alix's last
nonsense, promised to write--wouldn't say good-bye--would see them
all soon--was coming, Martin--and so a last kiss for darling Dad,
and good-bye and so many thanks and thanks to them all!

She was gone. With her the uncertain autumn sunshine vanished, and
a shadow fell on the forest. The mountain, above the valley, was
blotted out with fog. The brown house seemed dark and empty when
the last guests had loitered away, and the last caterer had
gathered up his possessions and had gone. Hong was prosaically
making mutton broth for dinner; pyramids of sandwiches and little
cakes stood on the sideboard.

Up in Cherry's room there was a litter of tissue papers, and pins
and powder were strewn on the bureau. The bed was mashed and
disordered by the weight of guests' hats and wraps that had lain
there. A heap of cards, still attached to ribbons and wires, were
gathered on the book-shelf, to be sent after Cherry and remind her
of the donours of gifts and flowers.

Across the lower bed that had been Cherry's a pale blue Japanese
wrapper had been flung. The girls had seen her wear it a hundred
times; she had slipped into it to change her gown a few hours ago.
Anne, excited and tired, picked it up, stared vaguely at it for a
few minutes, and then knelt down beside the bed, and began to cry.
Alix, the muscles about her mouth twitching, stood watching her.

"Funerals are gay compared to the way a wedding feels!" Alix said
finally. "I've eaten so much candy and wedding-cake and olives and
marrons, and whipped cream and crab salad that my skin feels like
the barrel of a musical box! I'm going to take a walk! Come on,
Nancy."

"No, I don't want to!" Anne said, wiping her eyes, and sitting
back on her heels, with a long sigh and sniff. "I've got too much
to do!"

Alix descended to find her father and Peter discussing fly-
fishing, on the porch steps. The doctor had changed his unwonted
wedding finery for his shabby old smoking jacket, but Peter still
looked unnaturally well dressed. Alix stepped down to sit between
them, and her father's arm went about her. She snuggled against
him in an unusual mood of tenderness and quiet.

"Be nice to me!" she said, whimsically. "I'm lonely!"

"H'm!" her father said, significantly, tightening his arm. Peter
moved up on the other side and locked his own arm in her free one.
And so they sat, silent, depressed, their shoulders touching,
their sombre eyes fixed upon the shadowy depths of the forest into
which an October fog was softly and noiselessly creeping.




CHAPTER IV


Meanwhile, the hot train sped on, and the drab autumn country flew
by the windows, and still the bride sat wrapped in her dream,
smiling, musing, rousing herself to notice the scenery. The lap of
the cream-coloured gown held magazines and a box of candy, and in
the rack above her head were the new camera and the new umbrella
and the new suitcase.

When Martin asked her if she liked to be a married woman,
travelling with her husband, she smiled and said that it seemed
"funny." For the most part she was silent, pleased and interested,
but not quite her usual unconcerned self. She and Alix, taking
this trip, would have been chattering like magpies. She and Martin
had their dinner in the train, and then she did brighten, trying
to pierce with her eyes the darkness outside, and getting only a
lovely reflected face under bronzed cocks feathers, instead. After
dinner they had a long, murmured talk; she began to droop sleepily
now, although even this long day had not paled her cheeks or
visibly tired her.

At ten they stumbled out, cramped and over-heated, and smitten on
tired foreheads with a rush of icy mountain air.

"Is this the pl-l-ace?" yawned Cherry, clinging to his arm.

"This is the place, Baby Girl, El Nido, and not much of a place!"
her husband told her. "That's the Hotel McKinley, over there where
the lights are! We stay there to-night, and drive out to the mine
to-morrow. I'll manage the bags, but don't you stumble!"

She was wide-awake now, looking alertly about her at the dark
streets of the little town. Mud squelched beneath their feet,
planks tilted. Beside Martin Cherry entered the bright, cheerful
lobby of a cheap hotel where men were smoking and spitting. She
was beside him at the desk, and saw him write on the register, "J.
M. Lloyd and wife." The clerk pushed a key across the counter;
Martin guided her to a rattling elevator.

She had a fleeting thought of home; of Dad reading before the
fire, of the little brown room upstairs, with Alix, slender in her
thin nightgown, yawning over her prayers. A rush of reluctance--of
strangeness--of something like terror smote her. She fought the
homesickness down resolutely; everything would seem brighter to-
morrow, when the morning and the sunshine came again.

There was a brown and red carpet in the oblong of the room, and a
brown bureau, and a wide iron bed with a limp spread, and a
peeling brown washstand with a pitcher and basin. The boy lighted
a flare of electric lights which made the chocolate and gold
wallpaper look like one pattern in the light and another in the
shadow. A man laughed in the adjoining room; the voice seemed very
near.

Cherry had never been in a hotel of this sort before; she learned
later that El Nido was extremely proud of it, with its rattling
elevator and its dining room on the "American Plan." It seemed to
her cheap and horrible; she did not want to stay in this room, and
Martin, tipping the boy and asking for ice-water, seemed somehow a
part of this new strangeness and crudeness. She began to be afraid
that he would think she was silly, presently, if she said her
prayers as usual.

In the morning Martin hired a phaeton, and they drove out to the
mine. It had rained in the night, and there were pools of water on
the soft dirt road, but the sky was high and blue, and the air
tingled with sweetness and freshness after the shower. Cherry had
had a good breakfast, and was wearing a new gown; they stopped
another phaeton on the long, pleasant drive and Martin said to the
fat man in it:

"Mr. Bates, I want to make you acquainted with my wife!"

"Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Lloyd!" said the fat man, pleasantly.
Martin told Cherry, when they passed him, that that was the
superintendent of the mine, and seemed pleased at the encounter.
And Cherry smiled up at the blue sky, and felt the warmth and
silence of the day saturate her whole being. Presently Martin put
his arm about her, and the bay horse dawdled along at his own
sweet will, while Martin's deep voice told his wife over and over
again how adorable and beautiful she was, and how he loved her.

Cherry listened happily, and for a little while the old sense of
pride and achievement came back--she was married, she was wearing
a plain gold ring! But after a few days that feeling vanished
forever, and instead it began to seem strange to her that she had
ever been anything else than Martin's wife. The other women at the
mine were married; she was married; and nobody seemed to think the
thing remarkable in them, or in her. She was, to be sure, younger
and prettier than any of the others, but the men she met here were
not the sort whose admiration would have satisfied her innocent
ambition to have Martin's friends flock about her adoringly, and
more than that, they knew her to be newly married, and left the
young Lloyds to their presumably desired isolation. And very soon
Cherry found herself a little housewife among other housewives,
much more praised if she made a good shortcake than because the
tilt of her new hat was becoming.

For several days she and Martin laughed incessantly, and praised
each other incessantly, while they experimented with cooking, and
ate delicious gipsy meals. In these days Martin was always late at
the mine, and every evening he came home to find that ducks, or a
jar of honey, or a loaf of cake, had been contributed to Cherry's
dinner by the interested women in the near-by cottages. In all,
there were not a dozen families at the "Emmy Younger," and Cherry
was watched with interest and sympathy during her first efforts at
housekeeping.

By midwinter she had settled down to the business of life, buying
bacon and lard and sugar and matches at the store of the mine,
cooking and cleaning, sweeping and making beds. She still kissed
Martin good-bye every morning, and met him with an affectionate
rush at the door when he came home, and they played Five Hundred
evening after evening after dinner, quarrelling for points, and
laughing at each other, while rain sluiced down on the "Emmy
Younger," and dripped on the porch. But sometimes she wondered how
it had all come about, wondered what had become of the violent
emotions that had picked her out of the valley home, and
established her here, in this strange place, with this man she had
never seen a year ago.

Of these emotions little was left. She still liked Martin, she
told herself, and she still told him that she loved him. But she
knew she did not love him, and in such an association as theirs
there can be no liking. Her thoughts rarely rested on him; she was
either thinking of the prunes that were soaking, the firewood that
was running low, the towels that a wet breeze was blowing on the
line; or she was far away, drifting in vague realms where feelings
entirely strange to this bare little mining camp, and this hungry,
busy, commonplace man, held sway. Cherry was in the position of a
leading lady mysteriously forced into a minor role; she had never
known what she wanted in life, and was learning now in a hard
school.

The first time that she quarrelled with Martin, she cried for an
entire day, with the old childish feeling that somehow her crying
mattered, somehow her abandonment to grief would help to
straighten affairs. The cause of the quarrel was a trifle; her
father had sent her a Christmas check, and she immediately sent to
a San Francisco shop for a clock that had taken her fancy months
before.

Martin, who chanced to be pressed for money, although she did not
know it, was thunderstruck upon discovering that she had actually
disposed of fifty dollars so lightly. For several days a shadow
hung over their intercourse, and when the clock came, as large as
a banjo, gilded and quaint, he broke her heart afresh by
pretending not to admire it.

But on Christmas Eve he was delayed at the mine, and Cherry,
smitten suddenly with the bitterness of having their first
Christmas spoiled in this way, sat up for him, huddled in her silk
wrapper by the air-tight stove. She was awakened by feeling
herself lowered tenderly into bed, and raised warm arms to clasp
his neck, and they kissed each other. The little house was warm
and comfortable, they had a turkey to roast on the morrow, and
ranged on the table were the home boxes, and a stack of unopened
envelopes waiting for Christmas morning.

The next day they laughed at the clock together, and after that
peace reigned for several weeks. But it was inevitable that
another quarrel should come and then another; Cherry was young and
undisciplined, perhaps not more selfish than other girls of her
age, but self-centred and unreasonable. She had to learn self-
control, and she hated to control herself. She had to economize
when poverty possessed neither picturesqueness nor interest. They
were always several weeks late in the payment of domestic bills,
and these recurring reminders of money stringency maddened Cherry.
Sometimes she summed it up, with angry tears, reminding him that
she was still wearing her trousseau dresses, and had no maid, and
never went anywhere--!

But she developed steadily. As she grew skilful in managing her
little house, she also grew in the art of managing her husband and
herself. She became clever at avoiding causes of disagreement; she
listened, nodded, agreed, with a boiling heart, and had the
satisfaction of having Martin's viewpoint veer the next day, or
the next hour, to meet her own secret conviction. Martin's
opinion, she told herself wearily, as she swept and cooked and
marketed busily, didn't matter anyhow. He would rage and storm at
his superiors, he would threaten and brood, and then it would all
be forgotten, time after time after time. Silent, absent-minded,
looking closely at a burn upon her smooth arm or pleating her
checked apron, Cherry would sit opposite him at his late lunch.

"I suppose you don't agree with me?" he would interrupt himself to
ask scowlingly.

"Mart--" The innocent blue eyes would be raised vaguely. "I don't
know anything about it, dear. If Mr. Taylor--"

"Well, you know what I tell you, don't you?"

"Yes, dear. But--"

"For God's sake don't call me DEAR when you--"

"Mart!" Her dignity always rose in arms. "Please don't get
excited."

"Well!" His tone would be modified, as the appetizing little meal
was dispatched. "But Lord, you do make me so mad, sitting there
criticizing me--I can always tell when you're in sympathy with me-
-my Lord, I wish you had to go up against these fellows sometimes-
-" The grumbling voice would go on and on; Cherry would pause at
the door, carrying out plates, to have him finish a phrase; would
nod sympathizingly as she set his dessert before him. But her soul
was like some living thing spun into a cocoon, hearing the sounds
of life only vaguely, interested in them not at all.

Martin seemed satisfied, and all their little world accepted her
as a matter of course. Pretty little Mrs. Lloyd went every morning
into the Company Store as the only store at the mine was called,
and smiled over her shopping; she stopped perhaps at the office to
speak to her husband; she met some other woman wheeling a baby up
to the cottages, and they gossiped together. She and her husband
dined and played cards now and then with a neighbour and his wife,
and they gave dinners in return, when the men praised every dish
extravagantly, and the woman laughed at their greedy enthusiasms.
Like the other women, she had her small domestic ambitions; Mrs.
Brown wanted a meat-chopper; Mrs. White's one desire was to have a
curly maple bedroom set; Mrs. Lloyd wanted a standing mahogany
lamp for the sitting room.

But under it all Cherry knew that something young and
irresponsible and confident in her had been killed. She never
liked to think of the valley, of the fogs and the spokes of
sunlight under the redwood aisles, of Alix and the dogs and the
dreamy evenings by the fire. And especially she did not like to
think of that eighteenth birthday, and herself thrilling and
ecstatic because the strange young man from Mrs. North's had
stared at her, in her sticky apron, with so new and disturbing a
smile in his eyes.




CHAPTER V


So winter passed at the mine, and at the brown house under the
shoulder of Tamalpais. Alix still kept her bedroom windows open,
but the rain tore in, and Anne protested at the ensuing stains on
the pantry ceiling. Creeks rushed swollen and yellow; fog
smothered the mountain peak; the forest floor oozed moisture.
Spring came reluctantly; muddy boots cluttered the doctor's
hearth, for he and Alix and Peter tramped for miles through the
woods and over the hills, bringing home trillium and pungent wild
currant blossoms, and filling the house with blooms.

Cherry's wedding, once satisfactorily over, was a cause of great
satisfaction to her sister and cousin. They had stepped back duly,
to give her the centre of the stage; they had admired and
congratulated, had helped her in all hearty generosity. They had
listened to her praises of Martin and his of her, and had given
her more than her share of the household treasures of silver
spoons and yellowed old lace.

And now that she was gone they enjoyed their own lives again, and
cast over hers the glamour that novelty and distance never fail to
give. Cherry, married and keeping house and managing affairs, was
an object of romantic interest. The girls surmised that Cherry
must be making friends; that everyone must admire her; that Martin
would be rich some day, without doubt. When her letters came,
there was always animated chatter about the fire.

Cherry wrote regularly, now and then assuring them that she was
the same old Cherry. She described her tiny house right at the
mine, looking down at the rough scaffoldings that covered the
mouth of the tunnels, and the long sheds of the plant, and the
bare big building that was the men's boarding-house. Martin's
associates brought her trout and ducks, she wrote; she and Martin
had driven three hundred miles in the superintendent's car; she
was preparing for a card party.

"Think of little old Cherry going off on week-end trips with three
men!" Alix would say proudly. "Think of Cherry giving a card
party!" Anne perhaps would make no comment, but she often felt a
pang of envy. Cherry seemed to have everything.

Alix was working hard with her music this winter, aided and
abetted by Peter, who was tireless in bringing her songs and
taking her to concerts. Suddenly, without warning, there was a
newcomer in the circle, a sleek-headed brown-haired little man
known as Justin Little.

He had been introduced at some party to Anne and Alix; he called;
he was presently taking Anne to a lecture. Anne now began to laugh
at him and say that he was "too ridiculous," but she did not allow
any one else to say so. On the contrary, she told Alix at various
times that his mother had been one of the old Maryland Percies,
and his great-grandfather was mentioned in a book by Sir Walter
Scott, and that one had to respect the man, even if one didn't
choose to marry him.

"Marry him!" Alix had echoed in simple amazement. Marry him--what
was all this sudden change in the household when a man could no
sooner appear than some girl began to talk of marriage? Alix had
always rather fancied the idea that all girls had an opportunity
of capriciously choosing from a dozen eligible swains, but Cherry
had quickly anchored herself to the first strange man that
appeared, and here was Anne dimpling and looking demure over a
small, neat youth just out of law school. Certainly the little
person of Justin Little was a strange harbour for all Anne's vague
dreams of a conquering hero. Stupefied, Alix watched the affair
progress.

"I don't imagine it's serious!" her father said on an April walk.
Peter, tramping beside them, was interested but silent.

"My dear father," the girl protested, "have you listened to them?
They've been contending for weeks that they were just remarkably
good friends--that's why she calls him Frenny!"

"Ah--I see!" the doctor said mildly, as Peter's wild laugh burst
forth.

"But now," Alix pursued, "she's told him that as she cannot be
what he wishes, they had better not meet!"

"Poor Anne!" the old doctor commented.

"Poor nothing! She's having the time of her life," her cousin said
unfeelingly. "She told me to-day that she was afraid that she had
checked one of the most brilliant careers at the bar."

"I had no idea of all this!" the doctor confessed, amazed. "I've
seen the young man--noticed him about. Well--well--well! Anne,
too."

"You and me next, little sweetums," suggested Peter, dropping down
beside the doctor, who had seated himself, panting, upon a log.

Alix, the dog's silky head under her hand, was resting against the
prop formed by a great tree trunk behind her shoulders, and
looking down at the two men. She grinned.

"Nothingstirring, Puddeny-woodeny!" she answered, blandly.

The old man looked from Peter's smiling, indifferent face to his
daughter's unembarrassed smile; shook his head in puzzled fashion,
and returned to his pocket the big handkerchief with which he had
been wiping his forehead.

"There ye are!" he said, shrugging. "Cherry goes gaily off with a
man she's only known for a few weeks; Anne dresses up this new
fellow with goodness knows what qualities; and you and Alix here,
neighbours all your lives, laugh as if marriage was all a joke!"

"Our marriage would be, darling," Alix assured him. "But, Dad, if
you would like me to marry Peter, by George, I will!" she added,
dutifully. "Peter, consider yourself betrothed! Bucky," she said
to the dog, "dat's oo new Daddy!"

Neither man paid her the slightest attention. Peter scraped a lump
of dried mud from the calf of his high boots, and the doctor
musingly looked back along the rough trail they had climbed.

"I'd have felt safer--I'd feel very safe to have one of my girls
in your care, Peter," the older man said at last, thoughtfully. "I
hate to see them scatter. Well!"

He sighed, smiled, and got to his feet. "That's not in our hands,"
he said, cheerfully.

Alix, without moving, sent her glance from his face to Peter's,
and their eyes met. Only a few words, spoken half in earnest, on a
spring morning tramp, and yet they had their place, in her memory
and Peter's, and were to return to them after a time, and
influence them more seriously than either the man, or the grinning
girl, or the old man himself ever dreamed.

The glance lasted only a second, then Alix, who had been carefully
removing burrs from the soft tangle of the dog's tasselled ears,
took the trail again with great, boyish springs of her bloomered
legs.

"Father," said she, "am I to understand that you disapprove of my
choice?"

"I hope," her father answered, seriously, "that when you do marry
you will get a man half as good as Peter!"

"Thank you!" Peter said, gravely, more as a rebuke to the
incorrigible Alix than because he was giving the conversation much
attention.

Alix had time for no comment, for at this moment she placed her
foot upon an unsubstantial root and slid down upon the two men
with such an unpremeditated rush of heavy boots, wet loam,
loosened rocks, and cascading earth, that the footing of them all
was threatened, and it was only after much shouting, staggering,
balancing, and clutching that they resumed their climb. Peter was
then nursing a wrist that had been wrenched in the confusion,
looking away from it only to give the loudly singing Alix an
occasional resentful glance.

"You could omit some of those cries!" he presently observed.

"I thought you liked 'The Lotos Flower'?" Alix called back.

"I just proved that I do," Peter said neatly, and the doctor, and
Alix herself, laughed joyously.

In June came the blissful hour in which Anne, all blushes and
smiles, could come to her uncle with a dutiful message from the
respectfully adoring Justin. Their friendship, said Anne, had
ripened into something deeper.

"Justin wants to have a frank talk with you, Uncle," Anne said,
"and of course I'm not to go until you are sure you can spare me,
and unless you feel that you can trust him utterly!"

"And remember that you aren't losing a daughter, but gaining a
son--Oh, help!" Alix added. Anne gave her a reproachful glance,
but found it impossible to be angry with her. She was too
genuinely delighted with her cousin's happiness and too helpful
with all the new plans. Anne's engagement cups were ranged on the
table where Cherry's had stood, and where Cherry had talked of a
coffee-coloured rajah silk Anne discussed the merits of a "smart
but handsome blue tailormade."

The wedding was to be in September, not quite a year after
Cherry's wedding. Alix wrote her sister pages about it, always
ending with the emphatic declaration that Cherry must come down
for the wedding.

Cherry read of it with a strange pang. Somehow it robbed her own
marriage of flavour and charm to have Anne so quickly following in
her footsteps. She was homesick. She dreamed continually of the
cool, high valley, the scented aisles of the deep forest, the
mountain rearing its rough summit to the pale blue of summer
skies.

June passed; July passed; it was hot at the "Emmy Younger." August
came in on a furnace breath; Cherry felt headachy, languid, and
half sick all the time. She hated housekeeping in this weather;
hated the smells of dry tin sink and wooden floor, of milk bottles
and lard tins. Martin had said that he could not possibly get
away, even for the week of Anne's wedding, but Cherry began to
wonder if he would let her go alone.

"If he doesn't, I shall be sick!" she fretted to herself, in a
certain burning noontime, toward the middle of August. Blazing
heat had been pouring over the mine since six o'clock; there
seemed to have been no night. Martin, who had been playing poker
the night before, was sleeping late this morning. He was proud of
the little wife who so generously spared him for an occasional
game, and always allowed him to sleep far into the following
morning. Other wives at the mine were not so amiable where poker
was concerned. But Martin, coming home at three o'clock, dazed
with close air and cigar smoke, had awakened his wife to tell her
that he would be "dead" in the morning, and Cherry had accordingly
crept about her own dressing noiselessly, had darkened the
bedroom, and eaten her own breakfast without the clatter of a
dish, putting the coffee aside to be reheated for him when he
awakened. Now she was sitting by the window, panting in the noon
heat, and looking down upon a dazzle of dust and ugliness and
smothering hotness. She was thinking, as it chanced, of the big
forest at home, and of a certain day--just one of their happy
days!--only a year ago, when she had lain for a dreamy hour on the
soft forest floor, staring up idly through the laced fanlike
branches, and she thought of her father, with his mild voice and
ready smile; and some emotion, almost like fear, came over her.
For the first time she asked herself, in honest bewilderment, why
she had married.

The heat deepened and strengthened and increased as the burning
day wore on. Martin waked up, hot and headachy, and having further
distressed himself with strong coffee and eggs, departed into the
dusty, motionless furnace of out-of-doors. The far brown hills
shimmered and swam, the "Emmy Younger" looked its barest, its
ugliest, its least attractive self. Cherry moved slowly about the
kitchen; her head ached; it was a day of sickening odours. The ice
man had failed them again, the soup had soured, and after she had
thrown it away Cherry felt as if the grease and the smell of it
still clung to her fingers.

There was a shadow in the doorway; she looked up surprised. For a
minute the tall figure in striped linen and the smiling face under
the flowery hat seemed those of a stranger. Then Cherry cried out,
and laughed, and in another instant was crying in Alix's arms.

Alix cried, too, but it was with a great rush of pity and
tenderness for Cherry. Alix had not young love and novelty to
soften the outlines of the "Emmy Younger," and she felt, as she
frankly wrote later, to her father, "at last convinced that there
is a hell!" The heat and bareness and ugliness of the mine might
have been overlooked, but this poor little house of Cherry's, this
wood stove draining white ashes, this tin sink with its pump, and
the bathroom with neither faucets nor drain, almost bewildered
Alix with their discomfort.

Even more bewildering was the change in Cherry. There was a
certain hardening that impressed Alix at once. There was a weary
sort of patience, a disillusioned concession to the drabness of
married life. Alix, after meeting some of the other wives at the
mine--there were but five or six--saw that Cherry had been
affected by them. There was general sighing over the housework, a
mild conviction that men were all selfish and unreasonable. "And I
must say," Alix's first letter to her father admitted, "that the
men here are all dogs, except the ones that are under dogs!"

But she allowed the younger sister to see nothing of this. Indeed,
Cherry so brightened under the stimulus of Alix's companionship
that Martin told her that she was more like her old self than she
had been for months. Joyously she divided her responsibilities
with Alix, explaining the difficulties of marketing and
housekeeping, and joyously Alix assumed them. Her vitality
infected the whole household, and, indeed, the mine as well. She
flirted, cooked, entertained, talked incessantly; she bullied
Martin and laughed at him, and it did him good.

Perhaps, thought Alix, rather appalled at Cherry's attitude,
Cherry had been too young for wifehood. Sometimes she spoiled and
humoured Martin, and sometimes quarrelled with him childishly,
scolding and fretting for her own way, and angry with conditions
over which neither he nor she had any control. Alix was surprised
to see the old pout, and hear the old phrase of Cherry's indulged
girlhood: "I don't think this is any FUN!"

"Anne isn't one half as clever or as pretty as Cherry, but she'll
make a better wife!" was Alix's conclusion. She gave them spirited
accounts of Anne's affair. "He's a nice little academic fellow,"
she said of Justin Little. "If he had a flatiron in each hand he'd
probably weigh close to a hundred pounds! He's a--well, a sort of
DAMP-LOOKING youth, if you know what I mean! I always want to take
a crash towel and dry him off!"

"Fancy Anne with a shrimp like that!" Cherry said, with a proud
look at her own man's fine height.

"Anne was delicious!" Alix further revealed. "They used to take
dignified walks on Sundays. I used to tease her, and she'd get so
mad she'd ask Dad to ask me to be more refined. She said that Mr.
Little was a most unusual man, and it was belittling to his
dignity to have me suppose that a man and a woman couldn't have an
intellectual friendship. This in May, my dear, and after the thing
was settled and Anne had cried, and written notes, and Justin had
gone to Dad and asked where he could buy a second-hand revolver--"

"Oh, Alexandra Strickland, you're making up!" Cherry went back
naturally to the old nursery phrase.

"Honestly--cross my heart!" Alix assured her. "That's the way they
managed it; they solemnly discussed it and worked it out on paper,
and Justin's mother called on Anne--she's an awful old girl, too,
she looks like a totem pole--and Anne called on his aunts, and
then he asked Dad, 'as Anne's male relative,' he said, and it was
all settled. And THEN--THEN Anne became the mushiest thing I ever
saw! And not only mushy, Cherry, but proudly and openly mushy.
She'd catch Justin's hand up, at the table, and say 'Frenny--'"

"'Frenny?'" echoed Cherry, who had laughed until actual tears
stood in her eyes.

"That's short for 'friend,' do you see? Because of this platonic
intellectual friendship that started everything, you know. She'd
catch up his hand and say, 'Frenny, show Uncle what an
aristocratic hand you've got.' My dear, she'll keep me awake
nights repeating things he's said to her: 'He's so wonderful,
Alix. He's the simplest and at the same time the cleverest man I
ever knew.'"

"He sounds awful to me," Cherry said.

"He's not, really. Only it seems that he belongs to the oldest
family in America, or something, and is the only descendent--"

"Money?" Cherry asked, interestedly.

"No, I don't think money, exactly. At least I know he is getting a
hundred a month in his uncle's law office, and Dad thinks they
ought to wait until they have a little more. She'll have
something, you know," Alix added, after a moment's thought.

"Your cousin?" Martin asked, taking his pipe out of his mouth.

"Well, her father went into the fire-extinguisher thing with Dad,"
Alix elucidated, "and evidently she and Justin have had deep,
soulful thoughts about it. Anyway, the other day she said--you
know her way, Cherry--'Tell me, Uncle, frankly and honestly, may
Justin and I draw out my share for that little home that is going
to mean so much to us--'"

"I can hear her!" giggled Cherry.

"Dad immediately said that she COULD, of course," Alix went on.
"He's going to look the whole thing up. He was adorable about it.
He said, 'It will do more than build you a little home, my dear!'"

"We'll get a slice of that some time," Cherry said, thoughtfully,
glancing at her husband. "I don't mean when Dad dies either," she
added, in quick affection. "I mean that he might build us a little
home some day in Mill Valley."

"Gee, how he'd love it!" Alix said, enthusiastically.

"I married Cherry for her money," Martin confessed.

"As a matter of fact," Cherry contradicted him, vivaciously,
animated even by the thought of a change and a home, "we have
never even spoken of it before, have we, Mart?"

"I never heard of it before," he admitted, smiling, as he knocked
the ashes from his pipe. "If I leave the 'Emmy Younger' in
October, and go into the Red Creek proposition, I shall be making
a good deal myself. But it's pleasant to know that Cherry will
come in for a nest-egg some day!"

"Mart doesn't care a scrap for money!" Cherry said to her sister,
in the old loyal way. Since Alix's arrival she had somehow liked
Martin better. Perhaps Alix brought to her sister with a whiff of
the old atmosphere, the old content, the old pride, and the old
point-of-view. Presently the visitor boldly